Economic Change : Some Impressions 63 By the autumn of 1986, when we went to Beijing for a Sino-Indian symposium on economic development, the achievements of the Sixth Plan had been evaluated and the Seventh Five-Year Plan was in an advanced stage of formulation. The bverheating'ofthe economy in the early years of the Sixth Plan had apparently been arrested, and the mood was generally one of satisfaction with the way the transition from the traditional to the new system was progressing. There were no obvious signs of the widespread students' and workers' unrest which was to unseat Hu Yaobang before the end of the year and even oblige Deng Xiaoping to pay public homage to Mao Zedong and the pre-Cultural Revolution achievements of socialist development. The foreign visitors, at any rate, had no way of sensing the gathering protest, though there were occasionally biting cartoons and highly critical letters to the editor in the local English language papers. There were also, once or twice. indications of disagreement amongst the Chinese delegates to the CASS seminar,which the leader of the delegation, Professor Dong Fureng, sternly put down and the translators failed to tran -slate fully. In the smaller meetings with the faculties of CASS institutes or departments of Beijing University, however, some of the participants were more explicit on the emerging problems, though the criticisms in all cases were rather muted. Leaving aside minor issues, the concerns of scholars as well as of officials of provincial planning bodies, the People s Bank of China and the overseas Chinese spearheading the import of technology and development of 'special zones', seemed to centre on where exactly the ten principles set out in 1981 by Premier Zhao Ziyang were taking China and Chinese communism. Before I turn to the ten principles, there is a general point. The Cultural Revolution was particularly hard on the 'academics' and other non-producers who were believed to have deviated from leftist orthodoxy. Many of them were despatched to rural areas of the north and northwest,to do manual work and be ideologically reformed. With the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping th6se academicians returned to their old habitats and have now become strong supporters of the new policy of 'socialist modernisation'. Since much of our contact was with such rehabilitated intellectuals, the emphasis in all of the Chinese presentations was on the success of the new system .The problems that had surfaced in the mixed operation of two opposed strategies — the traditional strategy of high-speed growth vs. the new strategy of flexibility and qualitative optimisation — were all attributed to the weaknesses of the traditional strategy; if they had any doubts at all about the new system, they preferred not to dwell on them too long or too explicitly. In general. they tended to adhere to the view that 'the only way forward for China's national economy is to be found in a thorough changeover in its development strategy which will launch it on to a new solid road that promises higher economic returns and more practical benefits for the people .'^Thi's was clearly a one-sided view. Within the government, the party and indeed even the intelligentsia, there were many strong adherents to the old strategy of massive accumulation, centralised