Dr Sun Yat-sen is known both as a revolutionary and as a planner. As a revolutionary, he is honoured by many for being the father of modern China, whereas his development plans are often criticized for their naivete and idealism. The main focus of Sun's proposals for development was the expansion of China's railways, and it is often assumed that his 1921 railway plan map has had a significant impact on the contemporary network. This assumption appears to have originated in the work of Victor Lippit who stated that Sun's. plans influenced Nationalist proposals of the 1940s and those plans heavily influenced communist railway development in the 1950s.1 Lippit notes that 80 per cent of the mileage completed between 1950 and 1958 was included in Nationalist projections of the early 1940s and that the early 1960s was a period of little mainline development. Indeed, if Sun Yat-sen's map were taken as the base instead of the 1940s‘ plan, Lippit would have found an even higher correspondence. Twenty years have elapsed since Lippit made his study and the purpose of this article will be to reassess the significance of Sun Yat-sen's plans for the development of thec Chinese railway network up to the mid 1980s, and to give some idea of the influence of Sun's writings on the contemporary and future network.

In Hong Kong during 1966 and 1967 I had spent the first part of my sabbatical leave reading on subjects completely unrelated to the Chinese Communist movement, while on the other side of the border the Cultural Revolution was raging with increasing intensity and threatening to spill over into the Crown Colony.

In front of me are a copy of comments by Professor Ch'en on my article published in issue No. 106 of The China Quarterly, and a list of guidelines provided by the editors of the journal for me to observe in my reply. The space is limited, and I will restrict myself merely to explaining a few points in a possibly modest manner and leave Professor Ch'en and the reader to infer the others.

Since the late 1950s, when the core of China' science and technology (S&T) system was first established, a recurrent problem has been the lack of transfer of technology from research units to production enterprises. When the Chinese leadership of the post-Mao period decided that science and technology constituted a vital component of the Four Modernizations, it became increasingly clear that something had to be done about the inability of the S&T system to contribute to economic development.

China's drive towards modernization has been accompanied by a phenomenal increase in the number of statistics available. The statistical hiatus during the Cultural Revolution was followed by a revived and revitalized State Statistical Bureau (SSB) which in recent years has been churning out figures on every conceivable aspect of China's economy and society. Notoriously suspect in the past, China's statistics are now recognized as being much more indicative of the true state of China's development and, what is more, they are improving.