Photo: Baidu.com

A year after retiring from the post of Vice Premier in the State Council of the Chinese government, 71 year old Zeng Peiyan has been called back from live a ‘hermit’ (a reference to the Classical Chinese tradition of retired officials moving to the mountains to live a simple hermit lifestyle). This time Zeng has been given a new remit, as Chief of the Chinese International Economics Exchange Center (CIEEC).

This newly established high level think tank had its first meeting in Beijing on March 20th and it was due to Zeng’s previous high rank that media both at home and abroad have given the organization a lot of attention, even going so far as to call it the ‘Highest Level Think Tank in China’.

It is very rare that the Chinese government make a move such as this, and it is done just as the global economic crisis is on the rise as the country needs an overall strategy for fighting the crisis. It would seem that the current policy consultation bodies are unable to help the government in the face of such complicated times.

It is in the midst of this that the CIEEC was born and a lot of hopes are resting on it. “This is a kind of half government half citizen style of exploratory Chinese characteristics organization” said one of the think tank researchers, ex-Vice Chief of the National Development Bank of China, Liu Kegu. This is the shape of things to come for Chinese think tanks.

Zeng Peiyan along with 8 Assistants from Tsinghua University to Sinopec ex-high ranking leaders declared the body up and running at a banquet held at the China World Hotel in the World Trade Center, Beijing.

Photo: poeloq

It was Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier who personally oversaw the setting up of the new ‘High Level Think Tank’. The establishment of the organization involved the bringing together of two older consulting groups, the Center for International Cooperation and the Center for Foreign Consultation. According to reports from inside the government, Wen had been saying as early as November last year that the government lacked enough knowledge to face the complex economic crisis, and that a more scientific and democratic method was required.

The first major achievement of the think tank was to organize a Global Think Tank Summit for the end of June in Beijing. This will form a meeting of minds of some of 200-300 international think tanks along with 500 leaders of the world’s leading companies in order to work out policies to break the crisis and restablize Chinese economic growth.

The model for the combination of government officials and members of the public comes from the USA, where it has been seen to work well. Indeed, the success of these types of organizations comes from the fact that its members together have enough knowledge of the workings of government, while at the same time are close to the needs of the people and workings of business and society.

The political and business worlds are now looking forward to June and the International Think Tank Summit in Beijing to see just how much use this new body will actually be.

See the article in its original form at Sohu.com

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