Man Of The Year: Visionary of a New China

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wage for an unskilled factory worker in Hong Kong.

But the problems of industrializing a country so primitively equipped are huge. China's gross national product was only $373 billion in 1977, compared to $1.889 trillion for the U.S. The Chinese per capita income was a lamentable $378. A generator plant in Harbin uses lathes, punch presses and milling machines that were built two and three decades ago in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the Soviet Union. Japan builds 94 cars per worker per year; in China the comparable figures are one car, one worker. Steel, the essential building component for heavy industry, is regarded as a precious metal in China. The production goal for 1985 is 60 million tons; last year it fell just short of the halfway mark. Teng is characteristically candid about the problem. He refers to lo hou (lagging behind). "If you have an ugly face," he says, "there is no use pretending you are handsome. You cannot hide it, so you might just as well admit it."

One of the areas hardest hit by the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution was science/technology; the finest minds were sent to the country to learn egalitarianism and pig farming. Intellectuals until recently were branded as "stinking persons of the ninth category."*

As a result, the Chinese pool of scientists and engineers who kept up to date in their various fields grew perilously small. Teng's modernization drive now aims at rehabilitating scientists who were shunted to other work, at re-establishing research institutes and academies. According to one report, in Szechwan province alone 12,000 scientists and technicians have so far been returned to their old jobs from unrelated professions.

Despite the political depredations of Maoist anti-intellectualism, the Chinese are probably more confident of progress in this area than in any other of the Four Modernizations. The initial Chinese objective is the establishment within five years of a research network for the basic sciences, then a system of modern laboratories that will press on with research into what the Chinese (who have a sort of political fetish for numbers) call the Five Golden Blossoms: atomic science, semiconductors, computer technology, lasers and automation. In March, Vice Premier Fang Yi reported an eight-year timetable for China to begin the launching of space laboratories and probes.

Teng seems to have recognized the tumble-down state of Chinese learning. Today there are only about 630,000 university students in a population of 1 billion. Nationwide examinations for admission to universities were dropped in 1966 as part of the egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution. Now they have not only been reinstated, but they have become rigorous and uniform. Elite schools have been established and given the best teachers and facilities. Among teachers, ranks and titles have been restored. Salary increases and other perquisites have been adopted. But the intellectual infrastructure of China is still cripplingly weak.

The fourth modernization, that of the military, will be almost as difficult to accomplish. Although it has the world's largest standing army (about 3% million), China's military machine is primitive, at least 20 years behind those of the superpowers. China's most potent bomber is the antiquated TU-16 of 1954. The People's Liberation Army