Chinese puzzle | Frank Dikötter's 'Red Dawn Over China'

Frank Dikotter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, has written a detailed re-examination of Republican China, concentrating on how the Communist Party of China (CCP) gained power over a quarter of humanity. He titles it Red Dawn Over China, a conscious inversion of Edgar Snow’s 1937 hagiographic work Red Star Over China. Dikotter sets out to disprove Snow’s glowing account that made an international icon of Mao and his movement as a democratic, agrarian, reformist reaction to China’s abject condition.For Dikotter, the CCP has successfully sold the world the “fairy tale” in which, in a “country racked by an unholy alliance of ‘imperialist powers’ and ‘reactionary forces’, the Communists mobilise the ‘peasants’ by taking the land from the rich and distributing it to the poor, then they gradually unite the people in their fight against the Japanese invader and the fascist Nationalist Party (KMT).”In this task of deconstruction, Dikotter is assisted by access to a formidable range of recently available primary sources. What emerges from the documents, in Dikotter’s telling, are significant corrections to the generally credited narrative about Republican China. His major theme is the sheer marginality of the CCP to the history of China from its foundation in 1921 to the end of WWII in 1945. Dikotter argues that the CCP relied not on ideology or popular support, but on the systematic use of violence to seize power. Throughout the war against Japan, WWII and the civil war, he points out, millions of refugees tried to escape, pouring into KMT territory, but no one witnessed people fleeing towards CCP-controlled areas. For Dikotter, violence was not only an effective tool for the CCP, but actually the engine of the Communist revolution.The other major theme that emerges is the significant role that the Soviet Union played in the CCP triumph, and the extent of Soviet influence on Mao and the party, which the CCP naturally chooses to downplay now. Whether it was the initial survival of the party when the Comintern brokered the first united front between the KMT and the CCP in the 1920s, or subsequent turning points, it was the Soviets who stepped in to save the CCP.While the KMT bore the brunt of fighting the Japanese in the 1930s and during WWII, it was again the Soviet occupation of Manchuria, the weapons and training they gave the PLA, and their diplomacy that enabled the CCP to win a conventional war and rule China.In sum, for Diktter, the CCP’s victory was a result of Soviet financial and military support, amoral pragmatism and the systematic use of violence.All in all, this is a book well worth reading by all those interested in how China came to be what it is today. The book is a useful corrective to the conventional wisdom about Republican China, but it probably only presents a partial picture. The truth is far more messy, perhaps somewhere between ‘Red Star’ and ‘Red Dawn’.- EndsPublished By: Mansi Published On: May 8, 2026 20:33 IST

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Chinese puzzle | Frank Dikötter's 'Red Dawn Over China'

Using recently available primary sources, Frank Dikötter offers a remarkable reassessment of the origins of communist China

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