This article explores why and how the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a PRC state research-institute, survived after its involvement with the June Fourth demonstrations in 1989 through research regulation. I show how the explicit ascription of an advisory role to CASS required an increase in freedom of research and an increase in political steering through regulation. I do this by comparing the institutional setting of CASS in the early 1990s with that during Li Tieying's leadership (1998 to 2003). The article traces a general trend in which organizational reforms at institutions of higher education increasingly entail giving political direction to the development of the social science debate. Radical political views are discouraged through regulation, guidelines, meetings, academic activities and financial, material and social encouragement. This institutional approach aims to yield insight into the functioning of CASS as producer of knowledge and as think-tank to the government.