China's Technocratic Movement and the World Economic Herald

China's modernization has bred a technocracy that, at least in the near term, discourages mass involvement in elite competition. The Chinese government at all levels was largely restaffed in the 1980s. During the first six years of that decade, more than 1,370,000 senior cadres, all recruited before 1949, were retired. At the same time, more than 469,000 college-educated younger cadres, mainly engineers by training, came to leadership positions above the county level (Renmin ribao, October 11, 1987: 1 and June 29, 1986:1). Most promoted cadres were technocrats (professionals with technical training, usually in science, that legitimized their claims to offices of power). But these technical elites split in 1989. Many leaders of the dissident movement had earlier written approvingly of their own technocratic elitism. The main reform journal of the 1980s, the Shanghai-based World Economic Herald, claimed that China's modem strength depended on rule