CHINa'ยป TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION This article comprises extracts from a report in the SUN which appeared Sat. March 4. The report comes from Dr. Kurt Mendelssohn, F.R.S. the Oxford scientist, who. has just returned from his third trip to China. The "China Watchers", as the newspaper correspondents in Hong Kong and Tokyo like to style themselves, are too absorbed waiting for civil wer to watch out for one of the most important events of our time: the emergance of a technological power of fantastic dimensions. If China can maintain her present rate of scientific and industriel development, she will have eclipsed the rest of the world by the end of this century. She may possibly draw abreast of the West and Soviet Russia in the eighties. I first visited Chinese laboratories and factories in 1960. Ten years earlier, there had been nothing but chaos and destruction, the legacy of half a century of civil war and Japanese invasion. The first factories bought from Russia were teking shape in 1960, but the Soviet experts were leaving, with the work often half finished. To the Chinese, knowing full well that they would be unable to obtain the missing equipment, this was a severe blow. A good deal of their own effort was spent on the much ridiculed backyard industries, often attached to agricultural communes. Machine tools were rarely available and I saw girls winding with their bare hands electrical transformers for the agricultural grid. Nearby, 2 couple of boys and another girl were cutting out the transformer housing with chisel and hammer. Measured by Western standards, productivity was miserably low, but one suspects that for the Chinese, the transformers, although most welcome, were less important than the training. These youngsters, and there were 10,000 of them, were-the future factory foremen and they were learning industrial skill the hard way. Two years later in spite of the Russian withdrawal and two disastrous harvests, remarkable progress had been achieved. I saw a huge factory producing precision grinding. equipment for machine tool manufacture and there wes marked improvement too, in the universities and technological institutes. Through my scientific colleagues I met Mao Tse-tung and Foreign Minister Chen Yi, who both emphesised China's need for rapid expansion of science and technology. This resolve has not been forgotten in the upheaval of the cultural revolution. While the Red Guards are marching and the loud-speakers are blaring, the factories are humming and production is increasing everywhere. Both quality and range of Chinese industrial products are remarkable. There are oceangoing motor ships, air conditioned diesel trains, cars, buses, gas turbines and electrical generators, all made in China. Even more impressive are the highly sophisticated products, such as electron microscopes, precision balances, cameras, computers and every kind of electronic, optical and medical equipment. If fact, there sre now very few things China cannot make ond she is beginning to produce at an amazing rate. In the research laboratories of the Academy of Sciences I wes shown a lot of very advanced equipment -- for instance, super-conductive magnet coils operating in liquid helium. My Chinese colleagues emphasised that their achievements till lag far behind those of the Western countries, but there is no doubt that in only a few years they have gone an incredibly long wey. Backed by a population of 700 million of highly skillful and very intell-
igent people, China's technology will be a match for any country in the
world as soon as she has come into her full stride. One doubt remains,
however, the most important product of a technological country are its
scientists and engineers. The cultural revolution has closed China's un-
iversities since last summer. The Chinese said some time ago that they
intend to shorten their courses which, based on the Soviet pattern, are
unnecessarily long. Possible they will have made use of these last months
to revise the syllabus and they may, in fact, gain time by a new short-
ened span of study. However, time will not be on their side for very
much longer. If the cultural revolution is allowed to go on for most of
1967, China may lose heevily, not by political disunity but by the in-
terruption of technological training.