ABSTRACT
The study of Chinese politics in the United States is passing from the second generation of scholarship into the third. The studies of the late 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the tumultuous events of the Cultural Revolution and based on the new sources of information about the Chinese political system made available during that movement, are gradually being supplanted by a new generation of scholarship. The normative models focused on official Chinese Communist doctrine, drawing on Chinese descriptions of the mass line, democratic centralism, contradictions, and epistemology to try to construct an "operational code" for politics in the People's Republic of China. Models of two-line struggle were essentially caricatures of Chinese politics, originally developed by Chinese leaders as a tool with which to mobilize mass support in order to wage political conflict. The basic assumption of the bureaucratic approach is that the principal cleavage in Chinese politics is among competing agencies within the Party and state apparatus.
