LAUSR

In his article, Piyapong Boossabong presents an informative illustration of the field of policy analysis in Thailand and compares the roles of expert and local knowledge. As a policy scholar from China, I would like to make two points from a comparative perspective. First, regarding the history of the field of policy analysis, a sharp contrast between Thailand and China readily comes to the mind. As one of the few Asian nations which have never been colonized in the past centuries, Thailand has a long tradition of policy analysis. King Chulalongkorn launched comprehensive governmental and social reforms and enabled the modernization of Siam in the 1870s, roughly during the same period as the Meiji Restoration in Japan. As parts of the reform heritage, the School for Civil Service Studies was established in 1899, and the first Faculty of Public Administration launched in 1916 (Boossabong 2017). In the meantime, China’s Qing Dynasty initiated a Self-Strengthening Movement, limiting the change in the scope of economic and military modernization and rejecting any social and political reform. After decades of social turbulence and the authority’s resistance to Western social sciences, scholars were only able to import policy sciences into China in the early 1990s (Li and He 2016). Despite the astonishing gap in the starting points, the developments of policy analysis in both countries were significantly shaped by American traditions. The first faculty of policy analysis in Thailand got full support from Indiana University, and the first generation of scholars received education in the United States. In China, despite the rule of the Communist Party, the advocates of policy analysis also had substantive American experience. Some were prominent senior scholars who had attended American universities before 1949. After the launch of reform and opening up, they enthusiastically promoted Western social sciences. Others were a new generation of professors who went to America as visiting scholars in the 1980s and early 1990s. Therefore, policy analysis/public