At a two-day seminar hosted by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the University of Pennsylvania late last month in Shanghai, experts from leading global think tanks urged their Chinese counterparts to maintain independence from the government.

China has about 2,000 think tanks, which can be classified into four broad categories: research and information centers affiliated with the Communist Party of China, governments and the army; institutes of the academies of the social sciences system such as SASS; university study centers; and private research centers. Except for the last category, which is largely funded by enterprises, the first three groups are essentially State-dominated.

China has witnessed two waves of think tank development. The first was in the 1980s, when the entire nation began to build up a market economy. The second was after 2000, with the spread of the Internet in China.