In light of the worldwide ST and economic development and the demands set on the ST system by the national modernization drive in China, the author examines the government's authority and duties in the macro-management of the ST system on the basis of a brief evaluation of China's ST reform over the past decade or so. Reform is a process of institutional changes, in which, at any stage, the character istics of a given institutional arrangement must have its contextual logic and cognate inter-relations of mutual causality. Just as Douglass C. North points out: "History is always important and its importance lies not only in the fact that we might take something valuable from the past, but that the present and future are to link the past via the continuity of a society's institutional system. The choice of today and tomorrow is determined by the past." So, when we come to consider the future steps of ST reform in the new century, it is necessary for us, first of all, to review the past and analyze the new problems we have to face.
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