Mark Leonard describes how academic elites work with the government to shape Chinese debate.

Question: Where are the debates over China's future taking place?
Mark Leonard: What I focus on in my book is the debate between elites. I mean, there is a large elite within China. They are very influential. And in a way, they act as a sort of surrogate for the absence of the sort of institutions that you have in a free society. There are no political parties. There's no free media. You don't have trade unions to stand up for workers' rights. And that, in a way, gives the intellectuals a more important voice than they have in Western society, because they become a surrogate for political competition. The political class is happy to let ideas, have ideas in play, and these intellectuals who keep these ideas in play, and they see the sort of marketplace of ideas emerging. Sometimes the intellectuals do speak up for genuine concerns on a lower level, and they reflect the concerns that are happening within society. But it is very different from a Western political system where you have ideas filtering their way up through civil society and political platforms, which then compete in general