The Role Of Think Tanks In Obama Adminstration's China Policy

U.S. foreign policy making is an extremely complicated political process. While the executive and legislative branch plays a decisive role in foreign policy making process, the importance of think tanks cannot be ignored. With Sino-US relations is becoming the most important bilateral relations, a growing number of American think tanks start to focus on the study of Sino-US relations. And the new ideas brought up by scholars in American think tanks could help us follow the tendency of American China policy better. Throughout the Obama administration's China policy, we can find that think tanks played an important role in this political process through "revolving door" and other advantages. This paper tries to analyze how think tanks influence foreign policy making and find concrete influences on Obama administrations' China policy of think tanks in different areas. Also, this paper will use "a new type of great power relations" as a case to summarize different attitudes and advices given by scholars in think tanks, and try to find connections with Obama's real China policy to prove that think tanks matters a lot when it comes to U.S. foreign policy making.