With the death of Mao Tse-tung and the subsequent purge of the "Gang of Four," China's new pragmatic leaders have embarked on a crash program of national development known as the Four Modernizations, This program is geared to the primary objective of turning China into a major world economic and military power by the year 2000. In this book, the outgrowth of a major international conference on China's post-Maoist development, ten distinguished analysts examine one of the core issues in China's current modernization drive: the acquisition and use of modern industrial science and technology. The authors address the politics of China's technological modernization, the institutional structure of technological research, the purchase of foreign technology, constraints on technological absorption, the growth potential of China's critical energy sector, and the modernization of China's military establishment. Supplemented with brief commentaries by leading academic, government, and private sector contributors, their chapters provide an in-depth look at the process, problems, and prospects of China's widely heralded technological revolution.

Richard Baum is professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is editor of China in Ferment: Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (1971) and author of Prelude to Revolution: Mao, the Party, and the Peasant Question, 1962-66 (1975). He is currently working on a long-term study of U.S.-China trade and technological relations under a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. He organized and chaired the January 1979 Bermuda workshop on China's technological development.