More than five years have elapsed since the death of Mao Zedong, and the arrest of the Gang of Four in autumn 1976 effectively ended China's Cultural Revolution. The new policies associated with Deng Xiaoping and the four modernizations strategy have gradually become clearer, particularly since the third plenum of the eleventh Central Committee held in December 1978. In education, more than in most other areas, distinct in orientation separate the present leadership from those who instituted the Cultural Revolution reforms. Whether one refers to these differences-or, more precisely, strategies-as egalitarian versus hierarchical (Pepper, 1980a) or redistributive versus developmental (Unger, 1980), there seems little question of the intense commitment China's leadership groupings have given to one or the other of them. For those who stress the necessity for rapid economic development, an educational system was required that early on selected the brightest students and placed them in the best secondary schools and later in the best universities. Those who believe the development of socialism goes beyond rapid economic development and includes such elements as the redistribution of opportunities in favor of formerly deprived classes, the gradual elimination of the three great differences (between worker and peasant, mental and manual