cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50731537
Ever since Frank Dikötter’s first book, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992), this prolific star of China studies has challenged conventional truths and broached taboo subjects.
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Yet read as a whole, Dikötter’s body of work does read like a grave indictment of the Communist regime, which is one reason why he is not well-liked by the Chinese authorities.
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If Dikötter has long held a leading position on the Chinese Communist Party’s blacklist, his most recent book will give the authorities no ground to demote him. Red Dawn Over China is a history of the CCP’s rise to power over decades from its obscure origins in the early 1920s to the triumphant end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. To say the least, it was a very bloody affair.
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Those who have read Dikötter will immediately recognise his no-nonsense style, which intersperses dry numbers (thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of deaths) and occasional stories that shed light on how some of these people died. In this book he recounts the story of the CCP’s rise as a non-ending series of crimes, some very meticulously described. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets shot. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets buried alive. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets their head smashed by a rock. Numbers . . . numbers . . . someone gets eaten. Voilà, behold the dawn of Communism.
Dikötter’s general argument is, as he puts it, that “Communism was never popular in China.” It was imposed on the Chinese through systemic, unrelenting violence.
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There was no heroism, no glory, no grassroots enthusiasm for the Communist cause. Just endless brutality perpetrated by a deeply illegitimate movement that never had much of a purchase among the general populace.
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The [new] book is also a valuable reminder that today’s China — the prosperous, technologically advanced superpower — is a country built on a foundation of violence. “Political power,” Mao Zedong argued, “comes out of the barrel of a gun.” A tireless chronicler of the numerous crimes and follies of Chinese Communism, Dikötter once again shows his readers who was pulling the trigger of that gun, and at what cost to the long-suffering Chinese people.
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