ABSTRACT
Shambaugh believes that the Cultural Revolution and Sino-United States Rapprochement marked the beginning of "the stage – the transition from being a developing country to a newly industrialized one – that much of China has now entered". The hostility between China and the Soviet Union reached new heights when the Chinese and Soviet armies prepared for border conflict in the North. The Soviet Union increased its troops by the end of 1968 from seventeen divisions to twenty-seven divisions along the Sino-Soviet border. The Soviet Union had been the PLA's big headache not only in Vietnam, but also along the Chinese-Russian borders in the late 1960s. Another major change in the 1960s was an important shift of Beijing's defense strategy and national security concern: from the United States to the Soviet Union. Jiang and Lin worked together at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but after Lin's death in 1971, Jiang turned against him publicly in the Condemning Lin and Confucius Movement.
