"Riding a wave of criticism unprecedented in intensity or scope. China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution represented an epoch-making "struggle between the lines" to determine the direction of national development at a critical transition point. Leader of the triumphant "proletarian revolutionary line" was Mao Tse-Tung; leader of the vanguished "bourgeois reactionary line" was erstwhile Chief of State Liu Shao-ch'i, a prominent Communist theorist and organizer who had served as Mao's "close comrade-in-arms: for more than twenty years and was his designed successor. ... Mr. Ditmer illuminates the policy-making process of a revolutionary state facing diverging exigencies of economic modernization and political development."

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