Beijing’s Regional Studies Push Risks Campaign-Style Overreach

(Yaqi Li – Jamestown Foundation) Chinese universities only began teaching area studies as a distinct discipline in 2022, as a latent response to a perceived lack of personnel equipped to capably represent the state’s interests across One Belt One Road partner countries. The discipline’s overhaul is part of a wider push to reduce the hold of Western theory within academia and put forth an “autonomous knowledge system” under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party. The buildout of area studies programs has followed a campaign-style logic that runs ahead of genuine demand. Programs have opened at institutions with no relevant expertise, classes are filled by reassigning students out of weak foreign-language majors, and the small policy apparatus that hires graduates still recruits from only a few elite programs. The likely result is an oversupply of low-quality policy outputs rather than the country-specific expertise the leadership seeks. An emerging diplomatic knowledge base that is more Sino-centric and less legible to outside observers may also end up being less useful for the country’s long-term international engagement. – Beijing’s Regional Studies Push Risks Campaign-Style Overreach – Jamestown