In 1969, with the Cultural Revolution raging at home andtensions rising abroad, Chinese leader Mao Zedong instructedfour elder military leaders to study the relationships between China and the world’s two superpowers. Using Mao’s theoretical framework of “contradictions,” which states that the struggle between opposing forces is what drives history forward, they posited that the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union was greater than that between China and the Soviet Union, which in turn was greater than that between China and the United States.