Think tank examines South China Sea(2)

Skills shortage

The tough prospects for China's maritime sovereignty have raised concerns over the national shortage of qualified maritime-affairs personnel skilled in international dialogue and cooperation.

Hong said one of his center's top goals is to cultivate interdisciplinary experts on maritime affairs to address urgent issues, including the protection of rights and interests, resource development and international liaison.

The center has added 41 PhD tutors and 12 divisions for cultivating postgraduates. It plans to cultivate some 100 doctoral students and 300 master's-degree students within four years.

"The training is no longer geographically dispersed, and the number of trainees has grown rapidly," Hong said.

"The new cultivation style gathers maritime talent in different subjects and sciences, prompts them to learn from each other, facilitates brainstorming and then gives a boost to the integration and comprehensiveness of research. This is something unimaginable in the past."

Hong said as one of the urgent tasks for the center is collecting evidence to safeguard China's rights and interests in the South China Sea, and the center is building a comprehensive database of information for this purpose.

Although other institutions have already built databases to gather documents related to maritime studies, establishing a comprehensive database of fundamental information is of great urgency for Chinese researchers.

The center has obtained 30,000 documents from a range of institutions. Two atlases have been compiled, including geological information and detailing the evolving situation in the area.

The center has also effectively promoted China's research regarding the sea, and a senior expert also lauded its contribution to the industry.

Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, said Chinese think tanks traditionally place more emphasis on historical studies than legal studies, and the aging of scholars is also a problem.

"With such serious challenges in the maritime situation, the center functions as a national think tank and is capable of integrating resources and addressing challenges, which is of huge significance," Wu said.

The center will facilitate China's ambition of having a bigger say in the world as well as its public diplomacy, and it is expected to reduce the waste of research resources, Wu said.

According to Hong, in a bid to build the center into a leading national-level think tank, the center will facilitate its exchanges with top overseas think tanks to learn from their advanced methods of working.