It will have taken Chinese authorities fully 100 years to fulfil a key recommendation of the activists of the May Fourth Movement.
In the benighted days of 1919, student and intellectual firebrands, including quite a few pioneers of the communist movement, were demanding that the door be thrown open for Mr Sai (science) and Mr De (democracy).
According to blueprints being considered by the Communist Party leadership, China will become a 'scientific, hi-tech and democratic' society by 2020.
This, of course, presupposes that everything goes well, that the march to modernisation will not be derailed by disasters such as wars, recessions, factional power struggles - or retrogressions to Maoist norms.
While the leadership may be criticised for borrowing 80-year-old ideals, it is important to note that much of Chinese history consists in the re-invention of the wheel.
Take for example the basis for Deng Xiaoping's claim for the status of Chief Architect of Reform: his 'discovery' of the virtues of private property, that you work many times harder for your own company than you would for some moribund state-owned enterprise. Private entrepreneurship had thrived as early as the Tang Dynasty.
