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In my limited experience of policy makers and the associated research community in the UK and China, the Chinese product wins hands down. They are better trained, harder working and more driven but as experts not intellectuals.

This applies not only to a new generation of ministers who may be U.S educated but also to the plethora of research institutions communicating with government and state.

In this sense, as in many others, China provides an exemplar of twenty first century life. With large-scale social and political alternatives off the agenda, managerial pragmatism has come to the fore. Experts scope out workable policy agendas, and if intellectuals have any use at all, it is simply to endorse them.

Why China matters

Kerry Brown: The importance of China in solving our main global problems

Background

• The poison infecting China

• The farce of bashing China's human rights record

• China is losing the human rights race

• How experts replaced intellectuals

Eco-imperialism is alive and well and living in the West

James Woudhuysen: The West's pleading with China to cut carbon emissions bursts with ulterior motives

Historically, the Chinese intellectual always aspired to the Confucian ideal of public service. Between the 1911 revolution and the 1931 Japanese invasion, Chinese thinkers grappled with the problem of China’s late arrival at the starting gate of modernity. They discussed the role of ‘Science and Democracy’ and tried to work out a strategy for national salvation.

Many of their discussions echoed Gramsci’s idea of the intellectual as the holder of a national culture and history. But they also had startling parallels with earlier intellectual reactions in Europe: a national or liberal path. A similar creativity is evident in their political thinking pre-Tiananmen and perhaps more surprisingly during the Cultural Revolution.

Yet for the moment, the expert and the manager have supplanted the intellectual. Confucius may be back in fashion. But he is used to promote the idea of social harmony and in the forlorn hope of linking the ruling bureaucracy with a continuous cultural tradition.

A more appropriate task for the new generation of Chinese intellectuals is to understand how the peculiar relationship between an authoritarian state and an unbridled capitalist market is already being transformed into an alliance of corporate responsibility and life style management. But to do so the Mandarin elite will have to do something that it barely managed even in the optimistic 1920s - lose its unjustified sense of superiority and disdain for the masses. If not, they will once again face subordination to the prevailing hierarchy.

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Dr Kerry Brown is senior fellow at Chatham House on the Asia Programme, and author of `Struggling Giant, China in the 21st Century’. He is currently working on a history of the Communist Party of China. He can be contacted on bkerrychina@aol.com.