To establish sovereignty over ideas, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has since 2022 made the construction of an “autonomous knowledge system” an explicit objective, aiming to produce concepts and theories distinct from Western ones and capable of explaining the governance and social reality of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The effort is directed at the level of objectives and distributed at the level of content. The center supplies the goal and the label, while ministries, funding bodies, universities, associations, publishers, and individual scholars each write it into the one part of the academic system they control.
The consequence is expansion outpacing content. Institutional forms multiply well ahead of the concepts meant to fill them, because disciplines, colleges, degree points, journals, and textbook series can be created by decision and concepts cannot. Every instrument the Party-state controls is institutional, and institutions can require, fund, and reward original theory without being able to supply it. Four years on, the record therefore is highly uneven.
Institutions Outpace Ideas in ‘Autonomous Knowledge System’ – Jamestown
(Jean Christopher Mittelstaedt – The Jamestown Foundation)
The Global Eye is in partnership with SIOI
