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Less than twenty years after Mao Zedong's death, Maoism has been all but abandoned in China. The late Chairman's austere, egalitarian ethos has been thoroughly revised and revamped to suite the purposes of a new breed of marketized Marxists. In this book relating these changes, the author provides a comprehensive guide to the intricate theatre of post-Mao Chinese politics. He tells the intriguing story of an escalating inter-generational clash of ideas and values between the aging, orthodox socialist revolutionaries of the Maoist era and their younger, more pragmatic followers. Over the long run, aided by actuarial laws, the young reformers prevailed, and Maoism was laid to rest. The reform process was far from smooth or steady, however; on at least one occasion the process was halted amid a deadly hail of machine gun-fire. Penetrating the dense fog of interpersonal and intergenerational rivalry and intrigue in Beijing, Baum analyzes the anatomy of the reformers' ultimate victory, reconstructing the major twists and turns of the reform process, with its periodic, alternating phases of liberal relaxation and conservative retrenchment. Tracing these fluctuations directly to China's "paramount leader," Deng Xiaoping, Baum observes that Deng personally embodied both tendencies. Paradoxically, Deng was at once the chief architect of China's market reforms and the master planner of the brutal Tiananmen massacre. In analyzing Deng's ambivalence, the book shows how he shaped the fierce infighting among China's contending political factions and how this gave the reform process its familiar start-and-stop pattern.