Think Tank Warns Coronavirus Cutting Off US-China Back Channels

Here is more from Politico:

The global pandemic and a dramatic rise in U.S.-China tensions have further eroded the unofficial talks that have so often underpinned relations since the two sides restored diplomatic ties decades ago.

“The pandemic has cut off personal meetings. That is very bad,” said Wang Huiyao, director with the Centre for China and Globalisation, a Beijing-based think tank that includes former Chinese officials and prominent Chinese scholars. “Many messages can only be conveyed indirectly by spokespersons and media, which could compromise the effectiveness of the communication and easily lead to misunderstanding.”

Here is a link to the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), which was founded by Dr. Wang Huiyao and Dr. Miao Lu in 2008.

Chinese Think Tankers Targeted by DHS

Here is more from the Washington Post:

Alarms over the souring relationship went off in Beijing this year when Department of Homeland Security agents at the San Francisco airport stopped a half-dozen senior Chinese researchers, including some employed by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations — an influential think tank that answers to China’s intelligence agency. The agents confiscated the researchers’ laptops and phones and demanded their passwords, according to two people familiar with the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Outraged Chinese scholars suspected the searches were politically motivated and wrote to the State Department saying they would cancel future trips to the United States, according to a copy of an email from the think tank seen by The Washington Post. (The institute later resumed travel to the United States after receiving State Department assurances.)

The article notes that the Chinese have reached out to long-standing contacts at US think tanks in order to better understand the Trump Administration.  China has even dispatched a number of former government officials for "Track 2" meetings with US think tankers, but those meetings have not been very useful because "Washington's most prominent think tanks are populated by establishment figures who lack close ties to [President] Trump."

Hudson Institute China scholar Jonas Parello-Plesner recently said that CICIR is "an acknowledged part of the Chinese Ministry of State Security: the equivalent of the CIA running a front-end think tank."

Are Think Tanks Causing China to Lose the "Trade War"?

Here is more from the South China Morning Post:

Chinese policymakers have been left searching for answers to the trade war with the US because the domestic think tanks Beijing has called on for guidance have provided “filtered information” to avoid offending supervisors, sources close to the Chinese government and diplomatic observers said.

Beijing’s researchers also have been hamstrung by government restrictions on foreign travel that have limited the ability to devise a suitable response to the aggressive trade moves made by the administration of US President Donald Trump, the sources said.

In the six months since the US slapped punitive 25 per cent tariffs on US$50 billion of goods imported from mainland China, Beijing officials have been frustrated as the think tank experts being consulted for advice on a response only serve their backers’ interests, people involved in the consultations told the South China Morning Post.

In some cases, the experts had done insufficient research on the matter, the people said.

“Although the think tanks are all government-affiliated, their stances vary sharply,” a source said.

The article notes that in order to bolster its US research, the Chinese Ministry of Finance set up an alliance of 20 think tanks in July.  More information about that effort, called the "U.S. Research Think Tank Alliance," can be found here and here.