The ludicrous concept of the five-year plan, where bureaucrats that wouldn’t know a computer from a hole in the ground decides how many the country will need over the next five years, and how many industry should produce may be a bad joke in newly enlightened places like eastern Europe, but in the Chinese gerontocracy it still holds sway and an official from China’s Ministry of Machine-building & Electronics Industry says that over the next five years the country will make efforts to form an independent software industry: according to the Xinhua Chinese news service, a government official claims that China now has more than 30,000 scientists and engineers specialising in software development; China has listed computers and software as key sectors for scientific and technological development during the period of the eighth five-year plan, which covers 1991 to 1995.
