Reform, Modernization, and the Changing Constitution of Science in China

Abstract

Prior to the suppression of student demonstrations in June 1989, most observers of contemporary China saw the nation's reform programs as having entered a new and unquestionably more complex stage. The easy reforms had been made, and the relationships between political and economic reforms had become more prominent. Hopes for elite consensus seemed to be fading as the stresses of this new stage became more acute. With the crackdown on the demonstrators and the purge of Zhao Ziyang and those reformers close to him, the future has become even more uncertain. This article explores the dynamics of reform in a critical area of modernization-the development of science and technology-with an eye toward understanding the systemic forces that, along with elite politics, are likely to shape the reform agenda in the nearto medium-term future. Recognizing that nothing biases analysis more than postulating disembodied collective goals without regard to the individual political interests of the powerful, I would nevertheless like to propose that key actors in China continue to share with large segments of the population a common interest in modernization. What this term means in the Chinese context, of course, has been far from obvious. Nevertheless, to the extent we can explicate we can have a better sense of what China's reform objectives are likely to be. Rather than attempting the kinds of denotative definitions of that have helped give modernization studies a bad name, let us simply stipulate that modernity is the set of conditions that allows the