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Introduction
On October 9, 1983, Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang delivered a major speech at the State Council to officials with responsibility for economic reform, technology policy, and scientific research. Since his promotion to the premiership in 1980, Zhao had taken on steadily greater responsibility in steering the Chinese economy's “reform and opening”—and on that autumn day he had the future on his mind. “At the end of this century and the beginning of the next century,” he predicted, a “global New Technological Revolution” would emerge, with sweeping implications “for production and for society.” Zhao listed numerous reports and readings that had shaped this vision of the future, but one stood out: the work of the American futurist Alvin Toffler. Citing Toffler's book The Third Wave (1980), Zhao announced that Toffler believed that developing countries might be able to take “an entirely new route” to becoming a technological powerhouse. “This view is worthy of our attention,” he concluded (Zhao 2016, 2:198).
This remarkable endorsement of Toffler from the Chinese premier in 1983 was neither a passing fancy nor an inconsequential citation. To the contrary, Toffler had become a central part of the worldview of the leader with day-to-day responsibility for steering the Chinese economy's “reform and opening.”
This article examines Zhao's interest in futurist ideas and policies to respond to a “New Technological Revolution” or “Third Wave,” which came about as a result of his engagement with the ideas of Toffler and other futurists. Drawing on previously unstudied materials in Toffler's personal papers and internal Chinese sources, including a significant trove of nearly 500 leaked documents related to Zhao newly released in 2016, this article describes Toffler's interactions with China in the 1980s and demonstrates how Zhao and senior Chinese officials received and interpreted Toffler's ideas. Zhao and his network of policymakers, particularly the senior official Ma Hong, deployed these ideas about a global New Technological Revolution to advocate for a distinctive set of major and far-reaching policies blending technology, science, and economic development. This article shows that this policy vision of Zhao's provided a crucial context for the evolution of China's science and technology (S&T) policy and especially the creation of the 863 Program, which has been called “China's premier industrial R&D program” (Feigenbaum 2003,...