Exploring the crucial link between state and society in the PRC, this study analyzes the interaction between the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s major social groups—peasants, workers, youths and students, intellectuals, and ethnic minorities—since the founding of the People’s Republic. Alan Liu argues that uninstitutionalized public opinion has existed in China ever since the inception of the Communist regime and that it gradually grew powerful enough to thwart Mao’s policies and programs. He contends that the government’s radical post-Mao reforms emerged less from the preferences of another paramount leader—Deng—than from public opinion, which has grown too strong for the communist party either to ignore or control.