In Boao Forum Roundtable Discussion 4 on March 29th – The Role of Think Tanks in Decision-making, Eric LI (Board Chairman, Shanghai Chunqiu Institute for Strategic Studies) commented that many think tanks could not recognize their customers. In most cases, think tank’s target customers are conspicuously the government; however, the specific part of the government is not defined.

Also, he pointed out that there is a shortage of Chinese think tanks which see the general society as their customers.

More importantly, talking about the major problems of Chinese think tank reports, he pointed out that in many cases, there are a lot of ideas but insufficient detailed, practical and engineering-like analysis.