About China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations

China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations

The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR, 中国现代国际关系研究院) is one of China's largest, oldest and most influential research institutes for international studies, based in Beijing. Affiliated with the Ministry of State Security and guided by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, it traces its origins to Communist Party intelligence work during the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, and to a predecessor created after Premier Zhou Enlai's 1964 directive to build international-affairs research capacity. It was designated an open institution in 1980 and was renamed and upgraded from institute to institutes in 2003. CICIR has a staff of roughly 380 to 400 people, including about 150 professors and associate professors, organised into 11 regional and functional research institutes plus research centres, and it publishes the journal Contemporary International Relations, founded in 1981 and monthly since 1993, in Chinese and English, as well as China Security Studies. Western scholarship identifies CICIR as the cover identity of the Ministry of State Security's 11th Bureau and as a channel of analysis to China's top leadership. Its official website is cicir.ac.cn.

Origins in Wartime Intelligence Work

Scholar David Shambaugh and other historians of Chinese foreign-policy institutions trace CICIR's origins to the Chinese Communist Party's intelligence operations during the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945. Those early operations, conducted from the Party's base areas in Yan'an in the 1940s, included work directed at the United States' Dixie Mission and at the Soviet presence in the base areas — the Party's first sustained efforts to collect and analyse information about foreign powers. The institutional line then runs through the early 1960s, when, in 1964, Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the creation of several colleges, university departments and ministry research organisations to focus on international affairs, after judging that China lacked adequate capacity to study the outside world. A number of ministries, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Public Security, established think tanks and research organisations under that directive, and CICIR itself was established in 1965, falling under the Foreign Affairs Leading Group of the Communist Party Central Committee and serving senior officials. Reference works also record a distinction that underlines its unusual continuity: CICIR was the only international relations institute or university in China that did not close during the Cultural Revolution.

From Closed Institute to Open Institution in 1980

For its first decade and a half CICIR worked as a closed, internally facing research body serving the leadership. That changed with Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up. In 1980 CICIR was designated an open institution, authorised to engage with foreigners and to receive foreign visitors and scholars — a status the candidate record for the institute records directly, and one that Western accounts describe as intended both to present Chinese analysis to the outside world and to enhance the collection of information through academic contact. Openness brought a public scholarly identity: in 1981 CICIR began publishing its journal Xiandai Guoji Guanxi, Contemporary International Relations, which became quarterly in 1986 and has been published monthly since 1993. In 1983, according to Western scholarship on the institute, CICIR was placed under the bureaucratic management of the newly created Ministry of State Security, and in 1999 it was again placed under the Party Central Committee while maintaining strong organisational ties to the ministry and to the Foreign Affairs Leading Group. In 2003 it was renamed and upgraded from the singular China Institute of Contemporary International Relations to the plural China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, reflecting its structure as a group of constituent institutes.

Affiliation With the Ministry of State Security

CICIR's institutional affiliation is the most discussed aspect of the organisation in Western writing. The institute is affiliated primarily with the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China's main civilian intelligence agency, although domestic Chinese media rarely acknowledge the fact; a 2009 article in Liaowang, the journal published by Xinhua, called CICIR subordinate to the MSS. Western scholarship, including the work of Alex Joske and of Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil, identifies CICIR as the cover identity of the MSS's 11th Bureau, operated by senior MSS officers and used to engage foreign diplomats and academics, and a 2009 report by the CIA's Open Source Center concluded that CICIR resembled a Soviet-style intelligence organ whose principal intelligence customer was the Foreign Affairs Leading Group, and that it was largely funded by the MSS. The French intelligence historian Roger Faligot described it as one of the rare examples anywhere of a think tank presenting itself as fully academic while being fully integrated into an intelligence service. Hong Kong media have debated the precise position — whether CICIR is the ministry's intelligence research arm or provides intelligence research and analysis for it — but the association itself is a standard element of reference entries on the institute, and it explains both CICIR's access to the leadership and the caution with which some foreign counterparts approach it.

Scale, Structure and Research Institutes

By Chinese and international standards CICIR is a large research organisation. Reference accounts give it a staff of approximately 400 people, including about 150 senior research fellows — a figure consistent with the candidate record's estimate of roughly 380 to 400 staff, including about 150 professors and associate professors. It is organised as a set of constituent research bodies: accounts describe 11 departments or institutes with different regional and functional concentrations, alongside two research divisions focusing on the Korean Peninsula and Central Asia, and eight research centres; more recent reference summaries describe 15 departments with regional and functional concentrations while retaining the two divisions and eight centres. That structure lets CICIR cover the world's major regions and the main functional questions of international politics — security, economics and great-power relations among them — inside one organisation. The institute is also a degree-granting body, authorised to confer master's and doctoral degrees, which makes it a training ground for Chinese international-relations specialists as well as a producer of analysis. Its headquarters is in Beijing, where its main building houses the constituent institutes and its publishing operation.

Publications: Contemporary International Relations and China Security Studies

CICIR's public scholarly output is centred on its journal Contemporary International Relations (现代国际关系, Xiandai Guoji Guanxi). Founded in 1981, shortly after the institute's designation as an open institution, the journal became quarterly in 1986 and has been published monthly since 1993, an unusually frequent schedule for a Chinese academic journal and one that lets it respond to current international developments. It is published in both Chinese and English editions, the English edition carrying CICIR analysis to foreign scholars, officials and journalists who follow Chinese thinking on world affairs. The institute also publishes China Security Studies, a title reflecting its security specialism. Beyond journals, CICIR's recorded activities include providing reports to senior leaders and government departments, carrying out projects on commission from the Chinese government, conducting joint research projects with domestic and foreign institutions, and promoting academic exchanges. The combination of a classified-facing advisory function and an open journal is characteristic of the institute: the same organisation writes for the leadership and, in its monthly journal, sets out positions that foreign readers treat as a guide to official Chinese thinking.

Research Focus and Track-Two Diplomacy

While CICIR's research spans the range of international affairs, Western profiles agree that its major focus is the United States and China-United States relations — the relationship that has structured Chinese foreign policy throughout the institute's existence. Its constituent institutes and centres cover other regions and themes, from the Korean Peninsula and Central Asia to broader security questions, and in April 2021 it established a Research Centre for a Holistic Approach to National Security to develop the concept of holistic national security; writing from that centre in 2021 argued that security threats were likely to emerge in new frontiers such as the polar regions, the deep sea, the internet, artificial intelligence and space, where the absence of clear geographical borders transcends traditional ideas of sovereignty. CICIR also conducts track-two international dialogues between experts and track 1.5 dialogues mixing government officials and experts, a format in which a leadership-linked institute can test ideas and transmit signals without formal negotiation. Through such dialogues, its journal and its exchanges, CICIR functions as one of the principal interfaces between China's security establishment and the foreign academic and policy world.

Leadership and Presidents

CICIR's list of presidents illustrates its place in the Chinese system. Geng Huichang served as president from 1990 to 1993 and later became Minister of State Security, holding that post from 2007 to 2016 — the clearest single illustration of the personnel connection between the institute and the ministry. Later presidents included Lu Zhongwei, from 1999 to 2005; Cui Liru, from 2005 to 2013; Ji Zhiye, from 2013 to 2018; and Yuan Peng, from 2018 to 2023, during whose tenure the holistic national security research centre was established, with Yuan as its secretary general. The current president, according to reference entries updated in 2023, is Yang Mingjie, who took over in 2023. David Shambaugh has written that CICIR's leadership all share lengthy careers in the intelligence services — a characterisation the institute's critics cite and its defenders treat as part of a Western framing, but one consistent with the documented careers of figures such as Geng. Leadership of CICIR is therefore both an academic and a state appointment, and changes at the top are followed by Taiwan- and China-watching institutions as signals about the analysis reaching Beijing.

Influence on Foreign Policy — and Its Limits

CICIR has held considerable influence over China's foreign policy decision-making, according to Shambaugh's assessment, in part because of its close organisational proximity to the Party Central Committee, the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, the foreign affairs apparatus and the Ministry of State Security, and in part because its large research staff can produce timely analysis for senior leaders. The Foreign Affairs Leading Group was identified in the CIA Open Source Center profile as its principal customer. The same scholarly literature adds a qualification: CICIR's influence is assessed to have declined since the mid-1990s, coinciding with the death or retirement of some of its senior researchers and with the growing influence of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in foreign policy decision-making, as China's diplomatic machinery professionalised and other institutes and university centres multiplied. Even with that relative decline, CICIR remains, in the standard reference description, among China's largest, oldest and most influential civilian research institutions for international studies — a position no other Chinese institute combines with the same history, scale and proximity to the security leadership.

How CICIR Is Described at Home and Abroad

Two portraits of CICIR coexist, and a balanced profile has to hold both. In domestic Chinese presentation, CICIR is a research institute for contemporary international relations: a publisher of a respected monthly journal, a degree-granting academic body, and a participant in scholarly exchange. In Western scholarship and journalism — including a December 2023 New York Times investigation of China's rising spy agency, which cited CICIR in its account of the Ministry of State Security — it is presented as the public face of the MSS's 11th Bureau, a set of research institutes used to influence foreign diplomats and academics and to collect intelligence. Academic studies of Chinese think tanks, from Shambaugh's 2002 China Quarterly survey of international relations think tanks to more recent European Council on Foreign Relations work on Chinese thinkers, treat CICIR as a central case precisely because it sits at the junction of scholarship and state security. Readers using CICIR's English-language journal or meeting its researchers in track-two settings are, on either portrait, engaging with one of the most authoritative available expressions of how China's security establishment analyses the world.

Visiting, Reading and Contacting CICIR

CICIR is headquartered in Beijing and its official website is cicir.ac.cn, with an English-language presence summarising the institute and its work; the website address also appears in the candidate record for this profile. The most accessible route into its research for international readers is the English edition of Contemporary International Relations, together with China Security Studies, both of which are catalogued internationally under the institute's name. Scholars seeking exchange with CICIR encounter it through the joint projects, conferences and track-two and track 1.5 dialogues it conducts with domestic and foreign institutions. Founded in 1965 from roots in wartime intelligence work and Zhou Enlai's 1964 research directive, opened to the world in 1980, and renamed as a group of institutes in 2003, CICIR remains a defining institution of Chinese international studies — one whose roughly 400 researchers, monthly journal and direct line to the leadership make it essential reading for anyone trying to understand how Beijing sees contemporary international relations.