Opening to the Outside World

Abstract

The end of the Cultural Revolution brought about an acute awareness among the Chinese leadership that China’s gap both with the developed countries and some of the developing countries had widened even further. While Mao’s China was experiencing a prolonged and self-inflicted ideological frenzy, many of its neighbours, led by Japan and the Four Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), became economic powerhouses in the region. In the late 1970s, when the country just opened itself to the outside world, this sent a shock wave to China’s reformist elite. There emerged a broad consensus that China could not develop itself in isolation and that it must import foreign science, technology, capital and management skills if its modernization programme was to succeed.