The national obsession with education is also reflected in government policy. At the very beginning of the period of economic reform, Deng Xiaoping viewed education as the foundation for the ‘Four Modernisations’: modern agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. In 1983 he proposed ‘Three Orientations’ for the Chinese education system — ‘education must be oriented to modernisation, to the world, and to the future’. In the same year, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council promulgated the Outline of Education Reform and Development in China, stressing ‘a strong nation lies in its education and a strong education system lies in its teachers’.