Despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying much attention to its ideas and who produces them. Yet China has a surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a serious challenge to western liberal hegemony

Mark Leonard is the executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. His book What Does China Think? has just been published by 4th Estate

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy’s vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx’s Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers.

As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain’s entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe’s in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.

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Margem de mais de 20 pontos em setembro diminui para 6 em Estado considerado crucial pela campanha da senadora

Hillary Clinton mantém uma estreita margem de vantagem sobre o senador Barack Obama entre os candidatos democratas em New Hampshire, um Estado que a campanha da ex-primeira-dama sempre considerou como uma espécie de porto seguro caso ela tropece nas primárias de Iowa, indicou uma pesquisa do Washington Post-ABC News.

Hillary é amplamente vista como a candidata presidencial do partido com mais experiência e mais possibilidade de ser eleita, mas com muitos eleitores em New Hampshire buscando um estilo de governar mais moderno, a primeira eleição primária dos EUA tornou-se muito competitiva.
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