The involvement of experts in Chinese policymaking: co-production of China’s polar science and policy

Using polar policy as a case, this article examines experts’ involvement in Chinese foreign policymaking. Building on research on the party-state’s internal consultative information system, it shows how Chinese polar experts are involved in polar policymaking through state institutions and party information channels. The article draws on 19 semi-structured interviews with Chinese polar experts and policy professionals conducted in China in April 2025, which were supplemented by institutional documents and publicly available sources. The findings distinguish three practices: horizontal advisory bodies mandated to coordinate expertise across bureaucratic systems; ad hoc mobilisation of expertise for major policy inputs, such as in the drafting of the 2018 Arctic Policy White Paper; and routine feedback and issue-framing through internal reference reporting (neican) and leaders’ written instructions (pishi), which increasingly reward report-writing as a form of political and organisational capital. The study extends Sinological scholarship on the internal consultative information system to polar policy and specifies how expert knowledge reaches decision-makers. The study also theorises the neican–pishi system as boundary infrastructure between science and policy and as a site of experts’ boundary spanning. The expansion of party reporting channels as boundary infrastructure broadens participation and increases competition and screening. This shows how expertise is produced, performed, and governed in contemporary China.