China has suffered from over a decade of turmoil which has prevented the development of modern information ser vices. Present policy stresses the role of information storage and retrieval in national development. Apart from technical and political constraints, China faces a serious handicap with its unique written language, where the 5000 plus characters needed to express scientific and technical concepts are too large to be handled cost-effectively by present computers. This report outlines ways in which China is currently attempt ing to meet these problems and provide for modern informa tion services by the end of the decade.
National Meeting on Coding of Chinese Characters, Qingdao, 31 January 1979, Beijing Radio Broadcast, 2 February 1979 .
4.
K.P. Broadbent , Dissemination of scientific information in the People's Republic of China (International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada, 1980) IDRC-148e.
5.
National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS) Newsletter 21(2) (1979) 6.
