East Asian scholars for hire! A new norm?

Consultancy, PR agency, and lobbying firm funding of individual scholars normalizes practices already applied to corporate-funded think-tanks.

You’re an academic or a think-tank researcher, and a specialist on a specific East Asian country. You receive a well written email offering decent funding for you to prepare an op-ed clearly supporting a specific political position on a regional issue. You look up the sender and find it’s a (fairly) reputable political consultancy based in London. What’s more, it’s something that you’d normally write about. The compensation is well decent; they’ll arrange publication; and they promise you’ll "influence the global debate." So, do you take the job?

This is not a hypothetical for many in area studies or international relations. It is becoming the new norm. The combination of shrinking academic budgets, an oversupply of underpaid PhDs, and a hyperactive global influence economy has created a fertile environment where paid opinion writing is less a question of "if" and more of "how much." But this convenience carries a moral cost, a professional dilemma, and sometimes a legal risk or career-ending drama!

Let’s be honest: most of us working in the policy-adjacent world have either received or know someone who’s received such an offer. Consultancies, lobbying firms, embassies, or media-linked PR agencies increasingly act as brokers of influence, seeking out scholars with the right credentials to lend credibility to their clients’ political agendas.

The requests are rarely framed as crude propaganda. Instead, they’re cloaked in language like “thought leadership,” “strategic framing,” or “raising awareness of underrepresented perspectives.”

And they don’t always ask for distortion. They don’t need to. They simply want what you might already believe—just sharpened, simplified, and made useful to someone else’s end. If they choose the right people at the right time, it’s still a successive campaign.

What’s the problem, then?