How does an authoritarian state co-opt its social scientists studying civil society?

What are the channels that an authoritarian state can employ to influence the research topics undesirable to the regime? I researched a Chinese scholarly network of civil society studies involving 14,088 researchers and their peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1998 and 2018. Individual and time fixed-effect models revealed that scholars who are at the center of the network closely follow the narratives of the state's policy plans and can serve as effective state agents. However, those academics who connect different intellectual communities tend to have novel ideas that deviate from the official narratives. Funding is revealed to be an ineffective direct means for co-opting individual scholars, possibly because it is routed through institutions. Combining these findings, this study proposes an initial formation of authoritarian knowledge regime that consists of (1) the state's official narrative, (2) institutionalized state sponsorship, (3) co-opted intellectuals centrally embedded in scholarly networks, and (4) intellectual brokers as sources of novel ideas.