ABSTRACT
To return to the book’s opening quotation, the SRI and the rich array of activities associated with it indeed was “the premiere place for the origin of reform policy, and the laboratory for training the reform elite” (Gu and Chang 1993, 38). That is, it was the origin for creating new ways to approach reform policy making and training not so much the reform elite, but professionals who thought, wrote, and advocated for reform approaches from the standpoint of being a professional. Taking an integrated approach to discussing both the reformers and the bureaucratic setting for research and publication in the two decades since China’s reform movement began, I have chronicled the changing relationship between researchers and the state. My approach centers on professionalizing research in a bureaucratically restrictive environment and promoting the exchange of ideas on what was possible in the current Chinese system in an effort to influence the nature and pace of China’s transition from socialism. The most representative example of this effort in the 1980s was the SRI, and in the 1990s the Unirule Economic Research Institute. The SRI provides one important starting point for understanding the complex dynamic between the state’s desire for reform information and the young reformers’ desire to become autonomous from the state, but to participate in and influence reform policy. They attempted to do this by establishing a new organization within the system that would both manifest and promote new research and administrative methods, while in the 1990s the effort took place outside the system. This final chapter pulls together the themes laid out at the beginning. After summing up the impressive advances made in professionalizing research, I conclude with remarks on the bureaucratic setting for future development of research in China.
