By addressing the issues that decimated China's monolithic elite in the late 1960s, this text illuminates not only the life and fate of Liu Shaoqi, but also the policy-making process of a revolutionary state facing the diverting exigencies of economic modernization and political development.

I: Liu's Fall; 1: Introduction; 2: The Life and Times of Liu Shaoqi; 3: Prologue: The Storm Gathers; 4: The Fall of Liu Shaoqi; 5: Liu Shaoqi in the Cultural Revolution; II: Two Roads; 6: Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong: A Comparison of Character, Political Style, and Policy; 7: The "Capitalist Road": Critique and Metacritique; III: Criticism and Self-Criticism; 8: Toward a Theory of Mass Criticism; 9: Mass Criticism and Mass Line; 10: The Structural Evolution of Criticism and Self-Criticism; Afterword