A let-the-cat-out-of-a-bag story from Time Magazine in 2001 declared that China had already flipped into a Technocracy, leaving Communism in the dust. The article, Revenge of the Nerds stated: 

The nerds are run­ning the show in today's China. In the twenty years since Deng Xiaoping's [Ed. Note: count back­ward to 1978 – 79] reforms kicked in, the com­po­si­tion of the Chi­nese lead­er­ship has shifted markedly in favor of tech­nocrats. …It's no exag­ger­a­tion to describe the cur­rent regime as a tech­noc­racy.

After the Maoist mad­ness abated and Deng Xiaoping inau­gu­rated the opening and reforms that began in late 1978, sci­en­tific and tech­nical intel­lec­tuals were among the first to be reha­bil­i­tated. Real­izing that they were the key to the Four Mod­ern­iza­tions embraced by the reformers, con­certed efforts were made to bring the "experts" back into the fold.