The key words to the success of the Chinese communist revolution are luck and violence — at least, that’s according to Prof. Frank Dikötter.
Continuing from our last episode on Prof. Frank Dikötter’s new book, Red Dawn Over China, we trace the origin story of the Chinese Communist Party, and revisit how the CCP went from an obscure, unpopular, intellectual-led political force to take over the whole of mainland China.
Prof. Dikötter is the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the most widely read living historian of modern China, with books translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of The People’s Trilogy, which includes Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).
We left off our story in 1929 last time, when the Soviet Union launched an oft-forgotten invasion into Manchuria and set the tone of Sino-Soviet relations. In this episode — which has been edited for clarity and brevity — we continue the story from 1929 to 1949, and trace the rise of the CCP through the Long March, the Yan’an period through the Sino-Japanese War, and how CCP emerged victorious in the civil war.
The key words we explore are luck and violence. In other words, not your official nationalist communist history from the third “Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century” (emphasis added), but a history of how an incredible willingness to use force against fellow party cadres and civilians combined with extraordinary international luck. Japan, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. propelled the CCP to its self-proclaimed glorious founding of the People’s Republic.
Enjoy.
Leo
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The Japanese threat kept the Communists alive
Last time we spoke about how the Chinese Communists were a small group of people with little appeal, until a now-forgotten war between China and the Soviet Union in 1929 proved to be a turning point.
By this point, the Chinese Communist Party basically doesn’t matter. It is a small group of individuals with questionable loyalties to Marxism. They were driven out of their own Soviets all over China and had to take cover in the far northwest of nowhere. Could you talk about the rise of Mao and how the Communist Party grew from obscurity into a force to be reckoned with?
The book is not all about Mao. He was for a long time a pretty minor figure. But he did emerge. He was recognized by Moscow in around 1929. He was seen as the one who might actually create that spark that ignites the prairie.
The entire period from 1929 up to the Long March has a number of interesting aspects which are somehow related to Mao but not necessarily entirely about him.
An informed listener might argue that if the Communists really were such a minor party, why did the central government, the Nationalists, spend so much time trying to surround the Communists and eliminate them? Why was it so difficult for Chiang Kai-shek to do this if they really were a small bunch of bandits?
By 1927 Chiang Kai-shek had reunited the south of China, established its capital in Nanjing, and then in 1928 he moved up to seize Beijing and unify the entire country. On his way up to Beijing his troops were attacked brutally by the Japanese in Jinan, Shandong province.
He had to keep a low profile. So the best way to maintain a large army and train them to fight was to go and fight the Communists.
If you read his diary, it’s very clear that this was the moment when Chiang Kai-shek realised that the key challenge to the Republic of China was Japan. He wrote down his resolve to come up with a long-term plan. He said this needed careful planning and it needed a lot of resources to repulse the Japanese.
The question was, how can he do that? He couldn’t openly train the nationalist army to fight the Japanese. He had to keep a low profile. So the best way to maintain a large army and train them to fight was to go and fight the Communists. As long as he was fighting the Communists, the Japanese were happy. They were worried about Moscow and the Communists.
There were two stages. One was the encirclement of the Jiangxi Soviet. The second stage was the Long March. Some 80,000 troops departed, 10,000 arrived a year later, in October 1935. You could say that was a great defeat, or you might say Mao was clever in that the Nationalists never truly managed to crush him and his troops. They didn’t manage to crush him in Guizhou, not in Yunnan, not in Sichuan, not in Gansu. They made their way all the way up to Shaanxi.
“Why crush them? Why not let them go to Sichuan, and then we can impose our government?”
Now, if you read Chiang Kai-shek carefully, it becomes clear that he used the Communists to unite the south of China. The Communists departed the Jiangxi Soviet. Chiang Kai-shek said, “Why crush them? Why not just steer them into the provinces which are reluctant to be integrated into a unified government directed by us from Nanjing? Why not let them enter Guizhou and then we follow them and we impose our own government? Why not let them go to Sichuan, and then we can impose our government?”
That’s exactly what he did. Merely months after the Communists entered Guizhou, Chiang Kai-shek eliminated the man in charge of the province and put his own man in control. He more or less unified Sichuan around that same period.
Another point: He didn’t want to pursue the Communists on their long march. He said, “Why send armed soldiers to run across the extraordinarily inhospitable terrain of Guizhou and Yunnan and Sichuan in pursuit of people who are very lightly equipped? We will block off their access to resources, we will steer them into inhospitable terrain. We will watch them as they die of hunger and disease.” That is precisely what happened.
The idea that you can take land from a landlord and give it to the poor didn’t make sense there. There were no landlords. There were no rich people.
Another aspect is what happened when the Communists seized terrain which was very often inhospitable. They started land reform. But when it comes to the entire 1930s there was no such thing as land reform for the very simple reason that these Soviets were established in mountainous, inhospitable areas where the villagers already struggled to survive. When the Communists arrived and imposed their own alternative state, they required ever greater amounts of grain to feed the army.
The idea that you can take land from a landlord and give it to the poor didn’t make sense there. There were no landlords. There were no rich people. Before you know it, there was an attempt to accuse middle peasants of being rich peasants. Villagers realized that the more they had, the greater the risk of dispossession. So they started producing less and less.
There is an interesting document where it says the villagers have become lazy, they no longer work. Why would they? In a great many of the Soviets, including the Jiangxi one, it wasn’t so much the military encirclements by the central government that led them to collapse. It was villagers fleeing to other regions, and starvation set in. That forced the Communists to abandon the region and seek greener pastures.
It’s ironic that while Marx said capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, what we’re seeing is communism collapsing under the weight of its own economic contradictions. The same pattern caused the Great Famine and many other economic disasters.
Anyone aware of the fact that the Communists were not able to run their economy after 1949 must wonder whether they were able to run an economy before 1949.
How did they run their economy, then? They must have had some sources of revenue, especially once they’re settled in Yan’an and northwestern China. They must have something to sustain themselves. It can’t just be pillaging villages, right?
It was pillaging from roughly the end of 1927 up until roughly 1931, when they didn’t have a Soviet base area. Then they managed to get hold of inhospitable terrain far away from the center of power. They basically exploited the local population until the economy collapsed through the sheer weight of that impoverishment.
Then, from 1936 onwards, there was the United Front. They got funding from the Soviet Union, but 70 to 90 percent of the funding actually came from Nanjing, the central government.
They tried to trade, they tried this, they tried that. All of it failed miserably until they started producing opium.
The Communists from ‘37 onward did nothing but fight the troops under the central government, not the Japanese. The Nationalists were quite upset about that, and stopped funding when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. They thought, well, if the Soviet Union can no longer dictate that we should fund the Communists, we can stop. And of course, Moscow stopped itself because it now had to fight the Nazis.
So around 1941, that funding stopped. There is some remarkable work done by Chen Yung-fa — I haven’t discovered much that is new — that shows how quickly the economy collapsed in Yan’an. They tried to have people work around the clock. They tried to trade, they tried this, they tried that.
All of it failed miserably until they started producing opium. And thanks to opium they managed to financially get through to 1945.
I once asked my grandma about our own family history. We’re from Northwestern China. She mentioned that her grandparents used to farm opium. Even now, a huge amount of government revenue comes from the monopoly on the tobacco trade. The revenue from the drug trade runs deep in China.
Stalin, the great architect of Mao’s Chinese communist revolution
Going back to the ‘30s and the early ‘40s, that was also when Mao staged a series of purges, ostensibly against KMT members, but also partly purging Soviet elements sent from Moscow. By this point, Mao became a rogue figure that Moscow couldn’t control anymore.
Yes and no.
As Mao’s troops arrived in Shaanxi at the end of the Long March, their star was at its lowest. They had some 40,000 followers in a country of half a billion. What were they to do? The solution was offered yet again by Stalin.
It was Lenin who enabled the creation of the Chinese Communist Party. It was Lenin who enabled them to join the Nationalist Party and spread the faith through the Northern Expedition. It was Stalin who sustained them all the way through. It was Stalin who told them to establish Soviets.
The Communists at this point had zero appeal.
And then it was Stalin who in 1935-’36 came up with the idea of a United Front. He said something that should have been crystal clear to anyone in the Republic of China: you should unite with the central government and fight the Japanese because the Japanese are the real enemy. The Japanese in 1931 had taken all of Manchuria and had a very powerful army. They were the key threat.
The Communists at this point had zero appeal. Workers didn’t care. Villagers knew of all the depredations and were not keen on the Communists. The only appeal they had was with scholars and intellectuals, but they were concerned about Japan. The Communists went on and on about fighting imperialism and all they ever did to fight imperialism was burn down missionary hospitals and schools.
After about six months, very slowly the penny dropped and Mao thought, yes, let’s have a united front. So this idea came from Stalin yet again.
I can see why Mao would drag his feet. Here I am finally settled in northwestern China, no one is at my tail anymore, but I only have a tiny troop of 30,000. I hardly have an economic base. I’m hardly popular. And now suddenly Stalin comes along and says, “Here’s a brilliant idea for you: Why don’t you become cannon fodder for the KMT?” If I were Mao Zedong, I would think, are you crazy?
Well, not really, because what Mao did and could have done a lot earlier is, first, he realized the anti-Japan message was very popular. It enhanced the appeal of the Communists. The one thing that rescued communism from utter oblivion is nationalism.
And then, Mao was not keen to fight. He said very clearly, “we have joined the Nationalists in the United Front, but we are not going to fight them [the Japanese].” And he didn’t fight them. There was one brief clash under Lin Biao and that was about it.
But then, in 1938, a Soviet leader from Siberia, Genrikh Lyushkov, went to Tokyo and became a traitor. Stalin wanted to purge all of Siberia because he could see a war coming up. All of Manchuria was now in the hands of Japan.
The buffer zone was gone.
Japan was right on the border. So he wished to thoroughly purge the Communist Party and the military in Siberia. When that happened, the Japanese thought there was a great opportunity. They attacked the Soviet troops in 1939 in the battle of Nomonhan, which is hardly ever mentioned by anyone.
The Soviets crushed the Japanese with their tanks. It was a brutal encounter of steel which convinced the Japanese military that they did not ever want to fight the Soviets again. And instead of getting oil from Siberia, they went all the way down and got it from the Dutch Indies, Indonesia, and elsewhere, which meant that they had to control the Pacific Ocean, which meant that they had to attack Pearl Harbor.
Weeks later, a peace agreement was signed between Moscow and Tokyo, and Stalin had the east under control.
This particular battle between Japan and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939 had huge implications for the Second World War. Weeks later, a peace agreement was signed between Moscow and Tokyo, and Stalin had the east under control. Then he attacked — with Germany — Poland, and divided it straight in the middle.
Throughout all these purges Stalin actually wrote to Mao. It was Alexander Pantsov in his biography of Chiang Kai-shek who discovered a letter in the Soviet archives. In it Moscow clearly says that Mao should not trust the people generally described as the 28 Bolsheviks — in other words, the people who were sent by Pavel Mif and other Soviets to China. He says these people are all traitors and you shouldn’t trust them. You should trust Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and Zhu De.
The leadership that emerged through the purges carried out in Yan’an from roughly ‘41-’42 to ‘43-’44 was actually the leadership that Stalin had highlighted in his letter. It is Stalin who said don’t trust any of those Bolsheviks. Mao is often said to have come up with his own team and to have gotten rid of all the Bolsheviks. But it was Stalin who initiated it. It is often thought that the great contribution of Mao was that he sinified Marxism in Yan’an. But that misses out a crucial part of the story.
He realized that if his troops went all the way to Berlin, they might as well stay in some of those countries, including Poland.
Stalin in 1943 abolished the Comintern. The Comintern was the instrument to try to promote a world revolution. Why would he want to abolish that? Because there had been a turning point in the Second World War with Stalingrad. For the first time, Stalin — and the rest of the world — could see the end of the Second World War was coming near. The Nazis were being driven back.
Stalin was thinking ahead. He realized that if his troops went all the way to Berlin, they might as well stay in some of those countries, including Poland, which he had invaded with Hitler back in September 1939. So he abolished the Comintern and then said no communist party should follow the model established by the Soviet Union. Each party should respond to its own history, its own culture, its own social conditions, its own political circumstance.
Why did he say it? Because he didn’t want the communist parties in Eastern Europe to look like mere puppets controlled by Moscow. He wanted them to look genuine, indigenous, coming from the bottom up.
Mao didn’t waste any time. The moment he realized that this was the new message from Moscow, he did exactly what Stalin told foreign communist parties to do. He indigenized it. He started saying exactly what Stalin had told him to say. “The Chinese Communist Party is unique. It has very different social conditions.”
That is still part of their speech.
It is. In many cases — the United Front, the fight against Japan, the formation of new leadership in Yan’an, the whole idea of the Sinification of Marxism in China — Stalin is time and again the great architect.
How Edgar Snow put Mao on the map
And for all that the Soviets have done, I think you make a rather daring claim that it is actually the American journalist Edgar Snow that put Mao on the map. At this point, it’s the Americans who are coming in to help the Communists. Could you talk a bit about that story?
Edgar Snow — fascinating man, journalist from Missouri — was invited to interview the Communists, Mao in particular, in 1936. He first published a number of articles which then would turn into a book called Red Star Over China that had enormous appeal.
It placed Mao and the Communists on the map and was the origin of this founding myth that the Communists were the ones who are in tune with the modern spirit of the 20th century and fought the good fight against imperialism, fascism, peasant immiseration, and feudalism. They’re the ones who will be about to fight Japan as well and liberate hundreds of millions. That story dates from Red Star Over China.
One American journalist after the other portrayed the Communists as mere agrarian reformers — as democrats, not true communists.
The Americans, as they moved back through the Pacific approaching Japan, these were horrific fights with huge casualties. So they were keen on the support of Stalin and agreed that Stalin would, in ‘45, invade Manchuria. They were also keen on getting the support of anyone in China, including the Communists. So from ‘42, ‘43 onwards, time and again, they urged the Republic of China — one of the four allied powers, a government that went with the Americans into Burma — to come up with an agreement with the Communists.
And not only that, but one American journalist after the other portrayed the Communists as mere agrarian reformers — as democrats, not true communists. It was Stalin again. In 1943, Stalin told the American ambassador in Moscow: these communists in China, they’re not real communists, they’re margarine communists. The Soviets told this to any American who was willing to listen.
If Stalin himself doesn’t recognize the Chinese Communists, portrays them as mere fake communists, how could he be wrong? So the Americans — not just the journalists, but the State Department, vice president — were so keen that they believed in this and saw the Communist as mere democrats, whereas Chiang Kai-shek was seen as a fascist.
This was the situation: Everyone could describe, write, criticize so-called free China, but nobody could travel to Yan’an, which was a forbidden zone. Yet Yan’an was portrayed as a realm of freedom and democracy, whereas Chongqing was portrayed as an authoritarian fascist regime.
The Communist Party can starve tens of millions and you will have the papa of Justin Trudeau come back and say there is no famine and this is a model to be followed.
After the purges in Yan’an, Mao started inviting a limited number of journalists and government representatives from the United States. It was a Potemkin village. These journalists visited model schools, model farms, and encountered actors. The archives describe how these propaganda teams made sure villagers who worked along the road would look up and wave at the foreigners. Everything was scripted.
There was this facade of democracy, behind which for the better part of three years tens of thousands of people had been interrogated, tortured, purged, and occasionally executed.
The playbook repeated itself again in the ‘70s when Nixon visited China. Rounds of foreign journalists, students, and tourists were invited to visit Daqing and Dazhai and came back starry-eyed.
There’s no end to foreigners who come back starry-eyed. It doesn’t matter what the Communist Party does. It can starve tens of millions and you will have the papa of Justin Trudeau come back and say there is no famine and this is a model to be followed.
François Mitterrand, future president of France, went to China, interviewed Mao and reassured the world on his return from China, in the midst of the famine, that nothing is wrong with the People’s Republic of China, these are all rumors.
The mistake made by the Americans and others during the Second World War was repeated time and again. That mistake is to deny, to not believe that Chinese communism is real communism, to believe that Chinese communism is really something else.
Kissinger believed that China is not communist. He writes about it being a Confucian entity. Bush senior, after the massacre in Beijing and elsewhere in 1989, was convinced that somehow Deng Xiaoping was a true reformer at heart. Clinton talked about China becoming a true responsible stakeholder, believing like so many others that with economic reform China would emerge as a democrat, that there would be political reform. They all thought that these Communists would somehow shed their skin and come out as full-fledged democrats, that we were just waiting. We’ll be waiting for a long time.
But it’s not just China that’s been exceptionalized. There are also American journalists and diplomats who visited the Soviet Union in the thirties, passed through gulags of all places, and still sung the praises of the great Soviet experiment. There’s something deeper about communist ideals getting hold of people’s imagination.
The book that one should refer to is Political Pilgrims by Paul Hollander. He looks at how so many foreigners from so many walks of life visit these communist countries or other dictatorships and come back starry-eyed. George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, who should have known about how you put up a play, visited Moscow in the 1930s, visited model prisons, model schools, model farms, believed all of it, and died with the portrait of Stalin by his bedside. There are countless other examples.
Yeah, too many.
But in the case of China there is something quite different. There is a deep hatred of the Soviet Union among those on the right and occasionally also those on the left. In Europe, there was a strong anti-Soviet tradition on the left, but not necessarily when it came to China. In the United States of America, it was precisely the people on the right, the anti-Soviet leaders, who became most pro-PRC from the end of the 1970s onwards.
The gift of Manchuria
The Chinese Communist Party and Mao Zedong found themselves at the point where international forces were aligned in their interests. They had the Soviets who were backing them. They had the Japanese who were crushing their enemy.
And then the Americans came along and told their KMT partners — who were all America-educated, who were experienced with American society, education, political elites, economic elites, who spoke English, were Christian, who fought alongside the Americans, and who were a true ally — that actually you guys need to partner with your enemy in the northwest who weren’t doing that much other than just resting and biding their time.
What do you make of it? Was Mao just lucky to be in such a strong position, or was there something else to it?
It was absolutely great luck. A successful dictator in general is someone with great skills and Mao had a great many political skills. He knew how to manipulate people, how to read a situation. One of the greatest skills of successful dictators is that they know how to wait, and also how to use fortune and misfortune.
By 1945, Mao was quite disappointed that the Soviet Union was not coming to his rescue — until a million soldiers crossed the border into Manchuria. The Soviets said you can regroup in Manchuria provided that you call yourselves local guerrilla fighters, not Communist Party members. This is what they did. The Soviets handed the countryside over to them in 1945.
Once the Soviets left in May ‘46, the central government started moving up the railways and attacking the Communists. They were about to crush them, pushing back the Communists across the border into Siberia, when [American emissary] George Marshall intervened, imposed a truce, and then in September 1946 imposed an arms embargo on the central government, that partner-in-arms during the Second World War.
From September 1946 onward, the Communists were being armed to the teeth by the Soviet Union with one train load after another coming across the border from Siberia with weapons, with arsenals being established, with officers gaining advanced training in Moscow. While the central government had to, first, reconstruct an enormous country in rubble, just like Europe, and two, had to fight with their hands behind their backs against. It became quite difficult.
But even then it wasn’t clear that the Communists would win.
To me the key point is that once they had the countryside in Manchuria, now we’re not talking about some miserable little Soviet in Jiangxi province from ‘31 to ‘34. We’re not talking about some incredibly inhospitable terrain around Yan’an and Shaanxi province.
No, this is the most fertile piece of land for both the Qing and the Japanese Empire.
Yes, and Manchuria is about the size of France and the United Kingdom combined. It’s absolutely massive.
And it is also the most industrially advanced area.
Even after the Soviets stripped away a great deal.
All of that makes a massive difference, in that now they could, at long last, implement land reform. Land reform really is a way of targeting potential enemies, power holders. You are slightly wealthier. You have been elected as village head. We will now target you and pit the majority of the villagers against you, distribute your assets to all of them so that all of them have blood on their hands. And then we can recruit. And they recruited massively, frequently under duress.
So they could recruit a lot of men, and they could get grain from the countryside. Plus weapons — the weapons deposited by the Japanese in Manchuria, handed over by the Soviet Union, but also weapons from the Soviet Union. The amount of aid that they received was enormous.
The key turning point was the siege of Changchun. An estimated 160,000 civilians died of disease and hunger after Lin Biao blockaded the city.
Mao himself said that power comes from the barrel of a gun. But it is not enough to have a gun or many guns. It is how you use the gun. The Communists used tactics which are very difficult to beat. They waged what I call unrestricted warfare. They used barrier troops, so a soldier who turns around and flees is instantly shot. They used villagers as human shields.
But to me, the key turning point was the siege of Changchun. We’ve all heard of the siege of Leningrad, of a great many cities — but Changchun, not very often. An estimated 160,000 civilians died of disease and hunger after Lin Biao blockaded the city. He gave the order in 1948 to quite literally turn Changchun into a city of death. It took eight months. People used anything. They cut down trees, they took wood from buildings, they ripped asphalt from the streets just to stay warm. They ate the bark from trees, leather belts. Barely anyone survived. It was just awful.
Once Changchun fell and other cities were being encircled, you had to ask yourself the question, what would you do? Fu Zuoyi was in charge of Beijing. Are you going to undergo the same fate? Are you going to watch that center of culture being completely destroyed from top to bottom? Of course, he surrendered.
There were still large battles that took place. But ultimately cities began to fall like dominoes. High-level military commanders started to surrender. They no longer had the appetite. They couldn’t fight an enemy that was determined at all cost to gain victory.
There’s a very interesting document I read once in the Taipei archives. It dates from 1951 or 1952. A high-level commander from the United States spoke to Chiang Kai-shek during the Korean War. He said, “You know what the Chinese do in Korea? They will just keep on sending troops toward you. That’s just impossible to fight.” Chiang Kai-shek looked at him and said, “If you and the United Nations cannot fight the Communists today, what do you think I should have done back in 1948 and ‘49?”
It is quite remarkable that America withdrew support for the KMT in the ‘40s and basically put the Communist Party in charge, only to fight them anyway just a few years later, but this time for a tiny peninsula called Korea when they could have had China. Even to this day, I don’t see that much American reflection on what happened.
They didn’t want to fight them. They wanted them as partners and in the end they had to fight them in Korea at great loss and great cost.
No Stalin, no Mao
The story you’ve told is striking. The conventional wisdom is that the communist revolution in China was the result of an agrarian movement borne out of the corrupt KMT exploiting the peasants through capitalism and imperialism, a revolution that was on the right side of history.
Whereas your research shows the key words are violence and luck. That if you are violent enough at the right time, if you’re patient enough, things could go your way. Is that a fair summary?
Yes, and also if you have the enormously influential backing of Moscow and you have the unwitting help of Japan. So, great luck, but also great backing.
And the Americans. Three of the most powerful forces in the world — the Russians, the Japanese, the Americans — all at some point came to Mao Zedong’s aid.
Yes. They all contributed. Absolutely.
Before our podcast, I was reading the disanci lishi jueyi (Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century) — the party’s authoritative take on party history. No mention at all of the Soviets and the Americans and their role in the party’s rise.
No, of course. All these movements appear as entirely locally, indigenously, and spontaneously generated. It was the same with North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. The Communists, Mao in particular, helped the Vietnamese communists to a huge extent, only for the Vietnamese to turn against the PRC, much like the PRC turned against the Soviet Union in June 1960. It’s a very common pattern. But the reality is that without Stalin, no Mao.
Even that playbook of trying to tell an indigenous story, that’s a Stalinist playbook.
I think so. The command from Moscow was very clear. We have abolished the Comintern. You are no longer part of it and you should reinvent yourself as an indigenously generated movement responding to local conditions.
What can we look forward to next? What do you have cooking?
I want to write a history of China in the last two centuries. I want to bring the whole thing together. One thing I realized working on this book is the extent to which key events have been overlooked or neglected, and somehow this entire story has been twisted beyond recognition.
The first thing to do is admit that the Qing was an empire and that they played the same game that any other empire played, that they were responsible for a massive genocide of the Jungar, that they repressed brutally throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. During the 19th century a lot of these repressed groups finally saw a chance to fight back and the result was an absolute bloodbath costing tens of millions of lives.
I want to go back to roughly 1800, dig around in the 19th century and then link it up with the 20th century into a readable history of modern China. That’s the goal.
The continuity of political violence in China.
Yeah, or just a history of modern China that doesn’t sidestep the violence and the horror, doesn’t go into a mythology proposed by Beijing. An evidence-based history of modern China, I would call it.
Great, I’m looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Frank.
Recommended reads
Frank Dikötter, 2026, Red Dawn Over China, Bloomsbury Publishing
Frank Dikötter, 2010, Mao’s Great Famine, Bloomsbury Publishing
Frank Dikötter, 2013, The Tragedy of Liberation, Bloomsbury Publishing
Frank Dikötter, 2016, The Cultural Revolution, Bloomsbury Publishing
Paul Hollander, 1981, Political Pilgrims, Oxford University Press
Edgar Snow, 1937, Red Star Over China, Random House
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!
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