Excerpt fromNIH report below--(Nixon visited China--Deng Reforms 1978)

The late 1970s were pivotal years for the history of modern China. The Cultural Revolution had encouraged attacks on Chinese experts and centres of research and learning, with few institutions (primarily military research ones) emerging unscathed. A period of stasis ended with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, followed by the high-level strife of the Gang of Four, and finally the consolidation of power under Deng Xiaoping. From the West's perspective, one visible sign of change was the new policies directed outwards from China to acquire foreign knowledge to assist in the four modernizations, the drive from 1978 to force progress in the areas of agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. Re-established and new links with Western institutions enabled many thousands of Chinese scientists to travel and learn abroad. In combination with reform of the internal Chinese science system in the mid 1980s, this has led to a present situation in which, as a Royal Society report of 2011 predicted, China's buoyant research sector can compete with that in the USA, at least in terms of numbers of scientific papers published.1