The Depth and Breadth of Frans-Paul van der Putten's China Research Career
What a distinguished China-researcher learnt about building a China-watchers career: the strengths and limits of academia, think-tank work and starting one’s own business.
Main Takeaways
Comparing different working environments
Working in a think tank gives you great academical freedom and societal impact, but there may be high competition for limited funding and a fair amount of administrative work.
Working in academia gives you great academic freedom, but there is less societal impact, and, unless you have a permanent contract, there is high competition for limited funds, and lots of administrative work.
Working for the government (as a researcher) gives you great societal impact and a stable financial situation, but there is much less academic freedom, and lots of administrative work.
Working as an independent researcher (starting your own business), can provide great academic freedom, societal impact, income and much less administrative work, but it depends on the visibility of your profile.
Comparing different working styles
Working as a researcher (in a think tank, academia or your own business) enables you to study a topic at much greater depth than if you work as a journalist. As a researcher you get to write a number of different articles all discussing the same topic. As a journalist, you are always jumping from one topic to another.
As a researcher as you become an expert on a topic, eventually you have a book stored up in your head waiting to be written. Journalism doesn’t afford you that kind of depth of expertise and information retention to write a book on a topic.
To be successful as an independent researcher, visibility is indispensable: establish your topic of expertise, collaborate with media and other researchers, attend conferences, and publish a book.
To establish yourself as an expert on a topic, writing a book is essential. One book is of more value than 200 articles.
Long term success in research is highly dependent on how passionate you are about a topic and how extensive your network of contacts around that topic is.
Introduction
This article aims to address two questions:
How did Frans-Paul van der Putten establish himself as one of the foremost Dutch China authorities?
What can we learn about working as a China watcher from Frans-Paul van der Putten’s experience?
Frans-Paul was kind enough to set aside some time for an online call to discuss some of the main challenges, lessons and achievements of his China-career. The following article is a summary of our conversation and has been published with his permission.
Frans-Paul van der Putten is known as one of the foremost Dutch experts on the geopolitical implications of China’s rise. While working for Clingendael - the most distinguished Dutch think tank focused on International security and Europe - he pioneered the first research group in all of the Netherlands specifically focused on China, the ‘Clingendael China Centre’. After fifteen years at Clingendael, Frans-Paul went on to start his own consulting business on China. His China expertise has been sought out by a large number of NGOs, think tanks, and governmental organisations. Such a profile makes his experience of great value to anyone starting as a China-researcher.
Deciding on China
When I asked how Frans Paul decided to dedicate his career to researching China, his answer revealed that at least initially it wasn’t intentional, but came in response to a trip he made to Shanghai during his bachelor studies in history. He was twenty at the time and the visit made him aware of how the history of the city, more specifically that of the french concession and the international settlement, was a meeting point for many of his academical interests - those of colonialism, business history and geopolitics. Before the visit he had been focused on entirely different regions of the world, so the pivot to China was sudden and unplanned.
Once he set his mind on China, he never looked away. He dedicated his master’s thesis on exploring the themes of Imperialism and the Boxer movement in China. Continuing with his PhD, he wrote a dissertation on European business strategies to dealing with political risk in China during the early twentieth century.
Main career challenges and transitions
Regarding the obstacles Frans-Paul confronted while developing his career, he makes special note of several - finding funding for studies, making the transition from studies to work, and continually re-adapting his professional skill set to match each new working environment.
Finding funding for PhD studies
When he was a student, the Netherlands still had mandatory military conscription, which could be swapped for one year of voluntary service. Having chosen the later Frans-Paul assisted a professor at Leiden university, Leonard Blussé - the very same who had supervised the writing of his masters thesis, and the very same who later ensured that he had funding for his PhD. In this case it was the relationship he had developed with a prominent researcher that helped him resolve the first - namely financial - obstacle. The chances of securing funding through the usual route - submitting a research proposal - were much less reliable.
Transitioning from studies to work
After Frans-Paul finished his PhD, the next challenge was finding a stable paid position as a researcher. It took him around six months to find a position as a business researcher at Nyenrode Business University. Initially he went into the job with the expectation that there would be little overlap with his interests, and thus saw it as a more temporary six month position which gave him time to look for more relevant work elsewhere. However he soon discovered that much of the research work he was doing addressed his interest in the role of business in international relations, and as a result he ended up staying for five years.
Transitioning from work to work
One might expect that switching among different research topics, each of which has some relation to Chinese politics and business, would involve a certain amount of overlap, but that was not the experience of Frans-Paul. He speaks of each career transition - from his PhD to working as a researcher in a business university and finally to working in a think tank - as involving a great deal of starting from the ground up all over again:
So I had to work pretty hard to switch from a historian first and then a business ethics researcher and then switching to international relations in China. (When first starting to work at a think tank) I had to focus on international security as a new field. I had to focus on contemporary China, China’s foreign relations, foreign policy, because I had studied the historical part, but not the contemporary. And also all the things that, you know, the publications that I had before that were related to China’s modern history, imperialism, business history, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, all those things, all those publications, they didn’t seem to have any value.
Integrating interests and experience
When switching to work at a think tank (Clingendael), although the work he was doing was more closely aligned with his interests, he found that China research was relatively unimportant compared to some of the other topics the organisation was focused on such as terrorism and European integration. He reflects on how for as long as he was working for someone else, there was always a certain amount of frustration at the lack of overlap between his topics of interest and the priorities of the institution he was working for:
When I was at the business university, I was disappointed that there was no focus at all on international politics. When I switched to the think tank, I discovered and was disappointed - there was no interest at all in international business. There was no overlap. I had hoped there would be some overlap, but no. And also thematically there is a lot of overlap between history and international relations; like if you focus on China, for instance. But I found that it’s not generally part of the work that you do. So if you work at an international relations think tank, nobody asks anything about history or shows any interest in history. Of course, you are free as a researcher to make use of that - if you have that experience or you have that interest, you can insert it into your work. But it’s not something that is being asked of you.
This meant that he had to work extra hard to secure funding for his research and prove its importance. Eventually his efforts led to the establishment of the Clingendael China Centre - the first working group specialised on China in the whole of the Netherlands. Despite this success, after having worked for Clingendael for around fifteen years, he felt it was time to do something new, and the administrative duties of working at Clingendael and the still rather scant amount of funding dedicated to China research only furthered his conviction. He left Clingendael and started his own consulting business.
Becoming Independent
Deciding to start his own business was a straightforward decision. The alternatives - returning to work for academia or working for a government, each had certain drawbacks:
(When working for the government) You don’t have the freedom that you have as a think tank researcher to explore the things that you find interesting. It is also very bureaucratic and also you’re part of a big entity, and you have to share responsibility with a lot of other people. So in the academic world - you have more freedom, but I don’t see the societal impact that I would like to see in my work. And government: societal impact, but you have very limited freedom.
After starting his own consulting business, Frans-Paul mentioned how important it was to establish his profile as an expert, and to make it visible. His work model is one of making his expertise visible and letting his clients find him, rather than looking for people to pay him for his work. To that end he mentions the importance of frequent publishing, media interviews, attending conferences, establishing a network of contacts by collaborating with other researchers on shared topics, and writing a book.
Final thoughts
Frans-Paul’s working experience is one of going deep before pivoting. He worked at the business university for five years before switching to work at a think tank. Afterwards he worked at Clingendael for around fifteen years before starting his own business. Each transition took him one step closer to researching his topics of interest in a way that wasn’t burdened by administrative or financial strain. Patience, passion and persistence, and a certain willingness to embrace risk and uncertainty were reliable constants grounding Frans-Paul’s career.