ABSTRACT
Among the senior leadership of post-Mao China a consensus has emerged that rapid economic development should be given high priority. This policy orientation, the leadership generally concedes, necessitates certain other policies. First, it requires the active cooperation of China's intellectuals, scientists, and technicians. Political authorities are as a result attempting to woo this group by liberalizing Party controls over their professional activities, by abandoning the practice of using class labels to curb their behavior, and by "licensing" certain forms of limited participation. Second, leaders also agree that fostering rapid economic development requires the institutionalization of the political system, the regularization of the bureaucracy, and the abandonment of the ad hoc mass mobilizations that characterized the Maoist era. Third, in the leadership's view rapid economic development also requires the rule of law to reduce the arbitrariness of administration and to protect both specialists and politicians from the abuses that many of them experienced during the Cultural Revolution. Finally, the new policy orientation requires the rapid expansion of both human and capital resource bases. On these requirements, there is little dispute.
