China's leaders have involved themselves in the formulation of science policy to a greater extent than have the leaders of most countries. Science policy also has played a significant part in the struggles between contending leaders, who often acted as patrons to different sectors of the scientific establishment. Party leaders, not themselves scientifically trained, have traditionally taken science and scientists quite seriously, seeing them as keys to economic development and national strength. Government efforts to direct science to further the economy and generate military payoffs, however, have historically been met with repeated frustrations. The frustration in turn contributed to frequent reversals of policy and had exacerbated the inherent tension between the scientific and political elites over the goals and control of the nation's science and technology. In any economic system there are likely to be tensions and divergences of interest between managers and scientists, but in China such tensions had been extreme and had led to repeated episodes of persecution of scientists and intellectuals. Science in China had been marked by uneven development, wide variation in quality of work, high level of involvement with politics, and high degree of policy discontinuity.
In the post-Mao Zedong era, the anti-intellectual policies of the Cultural Revolution were reversed, and such top leaders as Deng Xiaoping encouraged the development of science. But China's leaders in the 1980s remained, like their predecessors over the past 100 years, interested in science primarily as a means for national strength and economic growth. The policy makers' goal was the creation of a vigorous scientific and technical establishment that operated at the level of developed countries while contributing in a fairly direct way to agriculture, industry, and defense. Since the early 1980s, major efforts to reform the scientific and technical system through a range of systemic and institutional changes were initiated in order to promote the application of scientific knowledge to the economy. As in the past 100 years, policy makers and scientists have grappled with such issues as the proportion of basic to applied research, the priorities of various fields of research, the limits of professional and academic freedom, and the best mechanisms for promoting industrial innovation and widespread assimilation of up-to-date technology.
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