China: the legacy of the Cultural Revolution

Views of China are as diverse as its visitors. Here Tilman Spengler, who is responsible for scientific exchanges between China and West Germany's Max Planck Institutes, argues that the positive aspects of the Cultural Revolution have been forgotten, while Ken Hsu, (opposite), an expatriate geologist just back from China, lambasts that period and welcomes its passing. In a series beginning later this year, our China correspondent T B Tang — who has also recently visited China — will describe how science remains an intensely politicised activity, despite the impression in the West that the ‘Four Modernisations’ are loosening overtly political constraints.