About Pangoal Institution

Pangoal Institution

The Pangoal Institution (Chinese: 盘古智库, also rendered Pangu Think Tank) is a public policy think tank headquartered in Beijing, China. It works closely with Chinese companies and studies global governance, urbanisation and civil diplomacy in the countries and regions along the Belt and Road Initiative, alongside domestic questions such as regional development, ageing societies, the digital economy and macroeconomics. In the taxonomy set out in the Center for China and Globalization's Global Think Tanks (2.0) classification, Pangoal is grouped among China's corporate-legal-entity think tanks, alongside ANBOUND, the Grandview Institution and the Taihe Institute — a placement that reflects its position outside the traditional government and university institute system. Its chairman is Yi Peng, a former researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planning agency.

Pangoal is one of the generation of independent Chinese think tanks that emerged in the early 2010s, when Beijing was encouraging the development of new types of policy research organisations. Rather than depending on a ministry or a university, it built its identity around a network of younger scholars and business contacts, and it has used international forums, joint reports and overseas delegations to make itself visible well beyond China.

Founding in 2013 and institutional philosophy

The Pangoal Institution was established in 2013 and is headquartered in Beijing. Company and partner descriptions of the institution state that it is a public policy research institute largely funded by young Chinese scholars. That funding model distinguishes it from state-run academies: its founders and backers came from a generation of researchers who had worked inside or alongside government but wanted an independent platform for policy discussion.

Pangoal states its philosophy as "pursuing harmony between nature and humankind, and applying knowledge for public policy solutions," and it describes its working attitudes as "Objectiveness, Openness, Inclusiveness." Those formulations recur in its public profiles. The emphasis on applying knowledge is significant: Pangoal presents itself less as a purely academic body than as an advisory organisation whose research is meant to feed into decisions by governments and companies, and to serve national policy.

Leadership under Yi Peng

Yi Peng is the institution's founder president and chairman. He came to Pangoal from the National Development and Reform Commission, where he worked as a researcher, giving the young think tank a direct connection to China's economic planning establishment and to debates over urbanisation, a field in which the NDRC is the leading policy agency. Yi Peng has remained the public face of the institution: he leads its overseas delegations, opens its international forums and signs off on its partnerships.

Yi also writes in his own name on policy questions. In a January 2017 commentary for China US Focus, for example, he argued that although the international economy remained unstable, the trend of economic globalisation was irresistible, and that in the face of populist movements it was critical to demonstrate the benefits of globalisation and to make it broader and deeper, fairer to developing countries and more valuable to all. That argument — defensive of globalisation but insistent that its gains be shared more widely — captures the position Pangoal has generally taken in international settings.

Research agenda: global governance, the Belt and Road and civil diplomacy

Pangoal's stated fields of work combine international and domestic subjects. Its public profiles list global governance, country research and civil diplomacy among the countries and regions of the Belt and Road Initiative, together with high-quality regional development, ageing societies, the digital economy and social governance, and macroeconomics and finance. The Bridge Tank, a Paris-based think tank that visited Beijing in December 2019, summarised the institution in similar terms after meeting Yi Peng: a public policy think tank working closely with Chinese companies, studying global governance and civil diplomacy in Belt and Road countries and regions.

The civil diplomacy element is central to how Pangoal operates. Rather than publishing only for a domestic readership, it sends delegations abroad, hosts foreign former leaders in Beijing and joins international think tank networks, presenting Chinese private-sector and policy perspectives directly to foreign counterparts.

The 2016 India dialogue and private-sector consultancy

A clear example of that method came on 20 September 2016, when Yi Peng led a four-member Pangoal delegation to the Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF) in New Delhi. The interaction was aimed at exploring the potential for expanding economic cooperation between China and India, especially in the private sector, and the delegation met a broad array of Indian strategic and foreign policy experts, including former diplomats, military commanders and representatives of private industry.

The VIF account of the visit notes that Pangoal provides consultancy services to a large network of private business industries with a combined worth of over 5 trillion RMB — an indication of the scale of the Chinese business constituency the institution claims to advise. The discussion ranged well beyond investment: Indian participants raised China's blocking of India's bid to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group and of UN sanctions against Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, as well as India's trade deficit with China and the effects of Chinese steel and tyre exports on Indian industries. Speaking for China's private industry, Yi Peng said many Chinese businessmen, encouraged by the economic policies of the government in Delhi, were willing to invest in India and run their companies in India, as Indian companies, but he argued that tighter security checks on Chinese firms were impeding business flows and urged the Indian government to ease visa norms. The episode shows Pangoal performing the intermediary role it claims: carrying business concerns into strategic dialogue, and strategic concerns back to business.

The 2017 Peking University Belt and Road forum

In June 2017 Pangoal co-hosted, with the Peking University School of International Studies and the Nizami Ganjavi International Center, a forum at Peking University's Lakeview Hotel titled "China's Role in International Relations: Prospects of the Belt and Road Initiative." The forum drew former presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers of countries along the Belt and Road. The opening ceremony was chaired by Fan Shiming, vice dean of the School of International Studies, with addresses from Peking University vice president Wang Jie, former Latvian president and NGIC co-chair Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, and Yi Peng.

Yi shared China's intentions in launching the Belt and Road Initiative and explained what he described as the spirit of peace, mutual benefit, prosperity and good faith encompassed in it. Participants divided into five groups discussing the future of international relations and China in the age of globalisation, China's role in the global economic system, China as a contributor to global safety, interconnectivity and the Belt and Road, and China as a contributor to global governance. The closing ceremony heard from Ismail Serageldin, from Bai Yunfeng, deputy director of Pangoal's academic committee and president and CEO of the China Power Conservation and Environment Protection Group, and from Vīķe-Freiberga — a line-up that illustrates the mix of academic, business and former-official networks on which Pangoal draws.

International partnerships and the CGTN Think Tank launch

Pangoal was a founding partner of the CGTN Think Tank, launched in Beijing on 4 December 2019 by China's international broadcaster. The Bridge Tank, another founding partner, recorded that the new body held its first event the same day on the theme "Globalisation in transition: Adapting to a Changing World," and that its president Joël Ruet met Yi Peng, as chairman of the Pangoal Institution, the day before the launch. Membership of the founding group placed Pangoal inside a state-media-backed international think tank network, widening its channels for civil diplomacy.

The institution is also listed among the partners of the Europe–Asia Center, which describes it as a Beijing public policy research institute established in 2013. Such partnerships are the infrastructure of Pangoal's international work: they give a relatively young, privately funded think tank standing invitations and counterparties in Europe and Asia.

The Urumqi project and regional development work

Pangoal's interest in regional development has at times taken a practical, bricks-and-mortar form. In Xinjiang, a project jointly operated by Ucommune, China's agile office space manager, and the Pangoal Institution comprises approximately 10,000 square metres of office space in a high-tech digital industrial zone in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In May 2021 Ucommune reported that, using its asset-light model, the project had reached an occupancy rate of 85.65 per cent in just ten months. The venture linked the think tank's name to a working innovation-space project in western China, consistent with its research interest in how inland regions develop new industries.

Ageing research and the silver economy

Ageing societies are one of Pangoal's declared research fields, and the institution hosts an Ageing Social Research Centre. Its founder and chief expert, Liang Chunxiao, has represented that work internationally, including at the DBS Foundation's Impact Beyond Dialogue on the Shanghai–Singapore silver economy, which brought together more than 60 policymakers, academics and business leaders from both markets. Liang argued there that ageing is not a problem but a symbol of social progress, while noting that there are more ageing individuals but not enough caregivers, and that technology is needed to lower health costs while helping older people live more independently. The position — treating population ageing as a field for innovation and service design rather than only a welfare burden — matches Pangoal's broader habit of framing social change as a policy and business opportunity.

Recognition in Chinese think tank rankings

Pangoal's visibility in its early years was confirmed by domestic rankings. The 2016 Big Data Report on Chinese Think Tanks, produced by a team led by Professor Xufeng Zhu at Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management and released in January 2017, ranked the Pangoal Institution fifth overall in its Think Tank Big-Data Index, behind only the China Association for Science and Technology, the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, the Party School of the Central Committee and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and ahead of the Center for China and Globalization and the China Finance 40 Forum. The index measured influence through WeChat official accounts, citations in WeChat public opinion and the influence of verified think tank experts on Weibo, drawing on a sample of 510 Chinese think tanks — so the ranking principally attests to the strength of Pangoal's public and social-media presence in that period.

The 2025 Chengdu industries report

Pangoal's more recent work shows its regional and industrial research continuing. On 24 July 2025 it jointly released, with the NBD Think Tank of the National Business Daily, "The Epic Industrial Race: Research Report on the Development of Chengdu's Animation, Science Fiction, and Sports Industries." The report reviewed the momentum, advantages and future pathways of the three industries in Chengdu, the economic and cultural centre of western China, describing them as core components of the digital cultural and creative sector forming clusters worth over RMB 100 billion.

The report grounded its argument in Chengdu's economic base: the city's GDP reached RMB 2,351.13 billion in 2024, ranking seventh nationwide, with services contributing over 70 per cent, while Sichuan universities such as Sichuan University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China produce over 15,000 graduates in relevant fields each year. On science fiction, it recorded revenue of RMB 23.521 billion in 2023, up 17.49 per cent year on year, rising above RMB 28 billion in 2024, with research and development investment of roughly RMB 3.5 to 4 billion. The study is a good specimen of Pangoal's current output: city-level industrial strategy, produced with a media partner, aimed at helping a regional economy move up the global value chain.