 There is this interesting phenomenon in China today when all of a sudden, at the time of political summits or international sports event, then magically the sky over Beijing is blue. A city that is usually clogged in smoke is under perfect weather, not a single cloud in the sky. So how does this happen? I'm not a meteorologist or an atmospheric chemist. I'm a political scientist. I am interested in understanding the governance structures that lead to blue skies over Beijing or blue skies over China. I wanted to understand the kind of information, scientific data and analyses that feed into this process, what is done as a preparation, what is done underway, how is it implemented and what are the effects of these blue sky campaigns. So as a case study, we looked at the G20 summit in Hangzhou in 2016 and we wanted to understand how this was happening. What did the local government do in order to clear the skies? We were expecting that, of course, because governments in China are very powerful, they just shut down industries in a certain area, they restrict control and this has done a talk and very top-down and for a single event. We very soon found out that there is a lot of communication with scientists, a lot of input by scientists into this process and then we included these questions. So we wanted to understand what did the scientists do, how did they communicate with the local government and how did the local government use this information that was provided to them by the scientists. So altogether we wanted to understand the working conditions for the scientists, how they were involved in this process, to understand what kind of information the local government then took up and processed and also the relationship between these two groups, so the scientific task force on the ground and the local authorities in Hangzhou. We did empirical field work in China, basically qualitative interviews with both the scientists involved and representatives of the local government. We wanted to know from scientists how they basically worked, how they cooperated, scientists from Beijing with scientists on the ground in Hangzhou, how they communicated with the local government and then again how the decisions on the side of the government were taken. So which inputs by the scientists did they take into account when they considered all the measures they had to take in order to make the skies blue. The challenge was that during the G20 summit there was a lot of security measures in place in Hangzhou and we were not able to follow and observe the process as it happened. So during the G20 summit, which was our ideal plan, but that was not possible due to security reasons, we were only able to reconstruct the process afterwards. So we talked to the scientists and to the local officials and asked for their retrospective impression of the whole process. That's of course difficult, but we tried as best as we could to triangulate that with documents, media reports and other voices we could get hold of after the event. I was actually surprised to find that the G20 blue sky campaign had lasting effects. When I went into the field, I was expecting that it's a one-time activity, smorg-free venue for three or four days and then everything goes back to normal. Against this picture that we have of science being heavily controlled in China and policymaking not having anything to do with scientific insights, what we found was that there was a very intimate connection. You had technological upgrading, you had training for the local environmental officials and an overall much better overview of pollution sources in Hangzhou. And this information can be used in the future as well, for instance, when there is a smorg-alert. But there are of course constraints to the scientific input into policymaking. One example was that while the scientists were mapping the pollution sources in Hangzhou, they found that ground level ozone was a huge problem for the city. But because this was not part of what the government imagined as smorg sources and as the actual problem that had to be tackled, they ignored this information. So the scientists were not able to lobby for solutions for ground level ozone concentration in Hangzhou at that time. Altogether, I think the picture is not as black and white. There is scientific input into policymaking up to a certain degree in China. I think our findings are relevant at different levels. First of all, it helps us understand local politics in China better. We usually focus on Beijing and the major political decisions being taken by the central government. But what happens in this microcosmos on the ground in the local state where the state meets the people, but also as we found out local authorities interact with scientists? How does it work in practice and in detail? And there's many gaps in the literature still when it comes to these aspects. So understanding local Chinese politics better is one dimension. But I would also say we understand more about the nature of modern Chinese authoritarianism when we look at the interrelation of science and politics in China today. There is this old narrative of the Chinese Communist Party being a technocratic regime. But I think there is a lot of nuance that we can add to this narrative if we look at the micro procedures that I talked about. China moved away from taking political decisions only on the basis of ideology to trying to also bring across this image of a political regime that takes into account the latest and the best scientific findings and the most advanced technology. And in general, we understand more about both domains also individually. So under what constraints does science function in China today and how is scientific information being taken up by political authorities in China and what does it also make with, again, Chinese authoritarianism as a modern science-based regime? What we did so far, I would still say, is exploratory research. So there's a lot more we can do. I'm building a new research group here at the Max Planck Institute where we look at China in the global system of science. So the macro structures of this topic that I have just laid out. We look into the internationalization of universities in China, China's enormous ascent in scientific rankings and publication numbers, for instance, the agency of scientists when they interact globally with their peers and how they then face these constraints at home in China. I myself will continue in this domain where I look at micro structures. So far, I've looked into environmental governance, but there's other things, population governance, mobility, many, many different aspects you can study in order to understand this relationship between science and politics in China. And as I just said, looking into these micro structures you also always, I would say, understand more about the bigger picture and that's always where I come from in my research. And that's what I want to continue now.