Frank Dikötter, a prolific but controversial historian of modern China, wrote this book in Hong Kong, and describes the difficulty “working in a city where publications deemed to be politically incorrect are pulled from the shelves of public libraries on a regular basis, including my own books”.
His access to digitised sources was therefore essential. He also explains Hong Kongers “who helped me have chosen to stay anonymous, and wisely so”. The Chinese government does not take kindly to criticism or to deviation from its own narrative of history, in which the triumphant rise of the Chinese Communist Party, culminating in the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, is central. Dikötter likewise places the party front and centre, but history doesn’t get more damning than this.
Dikötter narrates an unremitting catalogue of wanton Communist violence, inflicted on anyone who owned any land in a succession of land reform campaigns; on cadres as Mao purged potential critics within the party; and in war as the Communists fought dirty against their Nationalist foes to win China, razing cities to the ground in the process.
He tells us the party mainly attracted bandits, “riff-raff and vagrants”, who were all too ready to commit atrocities. Like Dikötter’s other books, this does not make for good bedtime reading: it is packed with violent anecdotes, like the village leader “paraded through the streets and compelled to kneel every few metres so that the assembled villagers could cut him with knives” in 1927. (The Communists liked to implicate everyone in their violence so people were less likely to voice opposition.)
We read of a massacre of villagers in 1946, including whole families and 300 Christians burned to death for refusing to convert to Marxism, “leaving unrecognisable the charred remains of the victims”. These episodes are mild compared to many described here. But in a country of 440 million people, anecdotes can only go so far in making a general case.
Dikötter provides plentiful references (which would normally encourage trust), mostly to primary sources, to support his points. But look carefully, and those sources are used highly selectively and treated as if they were unproblematic rather than written by historical actors with deep antipathy to the Communists. Sources that run counter to his narrative are overlooked. Some of the secondary sources he relies on are themselves discredited.
While these are the concerns of historians, any reader might see the unrelenting caricature of the Communists as exclusively violent and ask how it would be possible for such a party to gain control of an enormous country without any genuine popular support. It would be a good question.
A balanced account would acknowledge the frequent violent excesses of the movement, but also its success in creating hope that it could offer a brighter future. Before the Communists, China was run by the deeply corrupt and unpopular Nationalist Party and suffered from decades of exploitation by the western and Japanese empires. Dikötter’s insistence that the Communists enjoyed no genuine popularity, but gained power solely through violence and held it through fear, flies in the face of much evidence and careful scholarship by less sensationalist historians. His hatred of the arty, evident too in his earlier books, leads him to present the most damning account possible of Communist barbarity.
Yes, Mao was ruthless and uncaring, but so was his rival, Chiang Kai-shek, who, in his efforts to slow the advance of the Japanese in 1938, deliberately burst the dykes holding back the Yellow River, flooding 20 counties across three provinces and killing between 30,000 and 500,000. Dikötter downplays this episode, emphasising the smallest figure even though that includes only those who drowned, not victims of water-borne disease and malnutrition. (Had Dikötter’s own book Mao’s Great Famine applied a similarly narrow definition of victims, he could not have reached the high death toll he argued for of 45 million.)
Chiang also razed to the ground the city of Changsha, condemning the inhabitants to burning to death or losing everything in the flames, an event skipped over entirely by Dikötter, though he mentions numerous Communist raids on the city. Starving out cities in brutal sieges was certainly a Communist tactic that caused a high civilian death toll, but this was hardly the first war to feature long and deadly sieges. China was far from the only country in which civil war was bloody.
Dikötter claims his argument, that the Communist victory came, not from winning hearts and minds, but from the luck of the fall-out of the second World War in China and military success, runs counter to the prevailing view. But, outside China, his narrative is the standard one that I have taught my students every year.
Dikötter is right that the party came from unpromising beginnings; there were a similar proportion of Communist Party members in the US in the mid-1930s as in China. He shows how Communist tales of derring-do in the Long March are more myth than reality. He also rightly highlights how China fought Japan almost alone in the second World War, and how Soviet occupation of Manchuria in 1945 gave the Chinese Communists a huge advantage in the subsequent civil war. Mao famously maintained “power grows through the barrel of a gun”.
By the 1940s, there is no need to exaggerate Communist violence. The party unleashed a wave of terror in 1942-44, in which dissent was silenced and almost everyone came under suspicion. The main outcome was the elevation of Mao to unchallenged leadership and the beginning of his personality cult. The Communists only rescued the economy of the impoverished region they ran by turning to opium production, which contributed 40 per cent of their revenue by 1943.
This is a highly readable account of the Communist seizure of power. Fans of military history will enjoy it, as will anyone wanting their anti-Chinese or anti-Communist prejudices confirmed. Dikötter is a talented writer with a huge platform to reach a mass audience, hungry for a better understanding of China.
He could choose to provide a fresh and compelling – but balanced and nuanced – history. Instead, he presents anti-Communist polemic, which puts the reviewer in the odd position of defending a party that has killed so many because it has also been genuinely idealistic and popular.
Isabella Jackson is Assistant Professor in Chinese History at Trinity College Dublin
