Crisis and resilience: The divergent trajectories of Chinese think tanks under geopolitical pressure

As knowledge production becomes central to global governance, Chinese think tanks, as social organizations embedded in an authoritarian system, face intensifying external pressures and structural constraints in international discourse. This article examines how different institutional types sustain differentiated resilience under such conditions by integrating GDELT-based longitudinal data with discursive entropy metrics across 69,154 articles published between 2020 and 2024. The analysis reveals a functionally specialized ecosystem in which official, university, and social think tanks occupy distinct positions within China's knowledge field. Social think tanks exhibit a pronounced V-shaped trajectory, with sharp contraction during the 2022 crisis followed by partial recovery, consistent with threat-rigidity dynamics, while official think tanks remain structurally insulated through stable state support. The proposed Crisis–Resilience Model (CRM) demonstrates how resource dependence and political sensitivity jointly shape nonlinear adaptation in knowledge institutions, contributing to the sociology of knowledge through a replicable entropy-based measurement framework and a transferable model for analyzing knowledge governance under geopolitical pressure.