In more politically radical periods — such as the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) — efforts were made to expand the ranks of scientists and technicians by sharply reducing education and certification standards.
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.
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.
Many Chinese inventions — paper and printing, gunpowder, porcelain, the magnetic compass, the sternpost rudder, and the lift lock for canals — made major contributions to economic growth in the Middle East and Europe.
It became increasingly confined to little-known and marginal individuals who differed from Western scientists such as Galileo or Newton in two primary ways: they did not attempt to reduce the regularities of nature to mathematical form, and they did not constitute a community of scholars, criticizing each other's work and contributing to an ongoing program of research.
The last decades of the century saw the establishment, under the auspices either of the imperial government or of foreign missionaries, of secondary schools and colleges teaching science, as well as the movement of Chinese students to advanced studies in Japan, the United States, and Europe.
Such officials were reluctant to grant foreign-trained scientists and engineers a status equal to that of Confucian scholars, and they were suspicious of foreign ideas about politics and social organization, such as professional autonomy, freedom of speech and assembly, and experiments rather than written texts as validation of propositions.
The government's view of the purpose of scientific work was set forth in the September 1949 Common Program of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which stated, "Efforts should be made to develop the natural sciences in order to serve the construction of industry, agriculture, and the national defense."
The period of the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) saw efforts to reassign scientists to immediately useful projects, to involve the uneducated masses in such research work as plant breeding or pest control, and to expand rapidly the ranks of scientific and technical personnel by lowering professional standards.
The economic depression and famine following the Great Leap Forward, and the need to compensate for the sudden withdrawal of Soviet advisers and technical personnel in 1960, brought a renewed but short-lived emphasis on expertise and professional standards in the early 1960s.
In extreme cases, individual scientists were singled out as "counter-revolutionaries" and made the objects of public criticism and persecution, and the research work of whole institutes was brought to a halt for years on end.
During the decade between 1966 and 1976, China's leaders attempted to create a new structure for science and technology characterized by mass participation, concentration on immediate practical problems in agriculture and industry, and eradication of distinctions between scientists and workers.
Typical projects included collecting information on new crop varieties, studying the effectiveness of locally produced insecticides, and making extensive geological surveys aimed at finding useful minerals or fossil fuels.
Geologists went to the countryside to collect folk wisdom on precursors of earthquakes, and networks of thousands of observers were established to monitor such signs as the level of water in wells or the unusual behavior of domestic animals.
Basic research was to be supported, although stress would continue to be placed on applied work, and China's scientists would be given wide access to foreign knowledge through greatly expanded international scientific and technical exchanges.
Between 1981 and 1985, a number of new journals discussed China's scientific system and suggested improvements, while national and local administrators sponsored a wide range of experimental reforms and reorganizations of research bodies.
In the mid-1980s many of the middle-aged, middle-rank scientists had low educational and professional attainments, but generally they could be neither dismissed nor retired (because of China's practice of secure lifetime employment); nor could they be retrained, as colleges and universities allocated scarce places to younger people with much better qualifications.
Its relatively privileged position generated resentment among those working in less well-funded institutes under the industrial ministries, whose workers — as well as some planners in the state administration — reportedly considered the academy both overfunded and overstaffed with theoreticians who contributed little to the national economy.
The NDSTIC functioned in a manner similar to the State Science and Technology Commission, concentrating on high-level planning and coordination across the vertical chains of command in which military research institutes and factories were organized.
[10]: 88 In the late 1980s, two of the five research subsystems — the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the military system — were relatively privileged in receiving government financing and being supplied with scarce resources and historically had tended to form closed, self-sufficient domains.
The system under the State Science and Technology Commission, which included the largest number of research institutes, was marked by wide variations in quality and a vertical, bureaucratic mode of organization that inhibited collaboration and exchange of information.
Chinese policy makers were well aware of these problems and, over the years, had responded with two forms of organizational remedies: high-level coordinating bodies and mass scientific associations that cut across administrative boundaries.
The leading group, a special-purpose task force formed by the State Council to address problems that cut across administrative boundaries, was China's highest-level policymaking organ for science and technology.
This latter function was accomplished through the publication of popular-science journals and books aimed at an audience with a high-school education and through lecture series, refresher training for technicians and engineers, and consultation for farmers and rural and small-scale industries.
The primary complaint of the leadership was that, despite thirty years of policy statements, central plans, and political campaigns directed at the attitudes of scientists and engineers, science still was not serving the needs of the economy.
Reformist political leaders and senior scientists identified a number of organizational problems that were inherent in the system adopted from the Soviet Union and that had been compounded by Chinese work unit and lifetime job assignment practices.
The distinctions among institutes subordinate to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the industrial ministries, provincial-level governments, colleges and universities, and even the NDSTIC were to be minimized, and all were to compete and collaborate in a single market-oriented system.
Although the press gave considerable publicity to scientists who had left the "iron rice bowl" of a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute to start their own business or to join a growing collective or rural factory, such resignations remained relatively rare.
The difficulties in transferring scientific personnel even when the Central Committee and the State Council made it official policy demonstrated the significance of China's unique work-unit system of employment and economic organization and the obstacles it presented to reform.
Some observers believed that because of its potential challenge to the authority of the party, which controlled personnel matters in all work units, job mobility for scientists, even though it would have promoted scientific productivity and the growth of the economy, may have been too extreme a reform to be feasible.