China think tanks must be ‘self-centred’ to project nation’s soft power: expert

China’s think-tanks should pay more attention to the nation’s actual conditions and rely less on Western knowledge, according to a leading Chinese scholar, who said policy advisers could better reflect and project the country’s soft power by incorporating “Chinese characteristics”.
Professor Zheng Yongnian, a political economist with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who is also a Beijing policy adviser, said that to better explain Chinese practices to the world and anticipate the…