Description

Chapter Five

Modernization and national minorities in China

CHINA has set her goal for becoming a modern socialist country before the end of the 20th century. She aims to catch up with advanced world levels in the fields of industry, agriculture, national defense and science and technology. This is a tremendous job.

China wants to become modernized not only because she has the urgent need to do so but also because the possibility now exists for her to do so. Such a possibility had not always been present.

It is common knowledge that China had been in her time a strong economic power. But in recent centuries, she had been outstripped by other nations first in the scientific and technological fields, then in industrial and agricultural development. In the last hundred years or more, with a decaying feudal rule at home and the infiltration of imperialism from abroad, she had been subjected to the indignities of a semifeudal, semicolonial country. Any major development of science and technology was impossible.

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