The Technological Transformation of China

For years statesmen and scholars have labored to understand the nature of China. Decades after the Long March and the Cultural Revolution, China still struggles to accommodate itself to the desires of communism as well as economic and industrial modernization. These objectives, recent events have shown, are not always compatible with each other. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Chinas economic plans. Since embarking on social and economic reforms, largely benefitting agriculture and the cities of the ''Gold Coast'' area, China has experienced certain consequences of the market place like inflation, unemployment, and graft. And party leaders have learned that modern technology and foreign capital do have an effect on ideological purity. Despite new social and economic disparities, Chinese leaders, hard-line and reform alike, agree on the Four Modernizations - major improvements in defense, industry, agriculture, and science and technology. In The Technological Transformation of China, author David McDonald describes some of the monumental tasks the Chinese face in these areas, especially in the current five-year plan for science and technology in which the Chinese government can claim some success. When Hu Yaobang, a long-time voice of reform, died in April 1989, and massive student demonstrations for ''democratization'' took over Tiananmen Square and much of Beijing, one of the students said to a Western journalist, ''Every four years, you change your government by voting. Every decade we have a revolution.'' Revolution or transformation? Whatever happens in China - including renewed repression - is an important part of our future. Bradley C. Hosmer Lieutenant General, U. S. Air Force President, National Defense University