{"id":16193,"date":"2026-03-10T13:08:03","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T02:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=16193"},"modified":"2026-03-10T15:22:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T04:22:07","slug":"the-challenge-of-chinese-communist-historiography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/10\/the-challenge-of-chinese-communist-historiography\/","title":{"rendered":"The challenge of Chinese communist historiography"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is widely understood that the Chinese Communist Party exercises intense control over its own history and does what it can to impose its own interpretation of China\u2019s modern history on its own long-suffering citizens and the rest of us. Frank Dik\u00f6tter has been fighting back against this \u2018Orwellian\u2019 control for decades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dutch by origin, Dik\u00f6tter is a scholar at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution. He has the good fortune to live in Palo Alto. Critics of a certain ideological stripe might denounce the Hoover Institution as a well of Right-wing propaganda, but any such assertion would require close argument, not mere assertion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If by Right-wing one meant simply critical of the Marxian Left and its violent off-shoots, Dik\u00f6tter qualifies \u2013 as does the present author. But it doesn\u2019t follow from this that one\u2019s writings constitute \u2018propaganda\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dik\u00f6tter has just written and published the fifth in his series on the impact of communism on China. It serves as a prequel to the other four volumes and covers a crucial aspect of the subject: the extraordinary <\/span>brutality<\/span><\/i> of the communist movement, in its quest for power, starting a century ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dik\u00f6tter has written many books on China, but this set consists of the following: <\/span>Mao\u2019s Great Famine: The History of China\u2019s Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-62<\/a> <\/span><\/i>(2010); <\/span>The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-57<\/span><\/i><\/a> (2013); <\/span>The Cultural Revolution: A People\u2019s History 1962-1976<\/span><\/i><\/a> (2016); and <\/span>China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower <\/span><\/i><\/a>(2022).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All five books have been published by Bloomsbury, an authentic masthead of what used to be the British Empire: London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The three volumes on Mao\u2019s China have been translated into 20 languages. His book on the great famine of 1958-62 has been very widely read, which is attributable less to its originality than to its readability and forceful style.<\/span><\/p>\n

More technical and demanding work on the famine \u2013 showing that the Communist Party\u2019s propaganda is not merely a whitewash but a wholesale lie \u2013 can be found in Dali Yang\u2019s path-breaking study <\/span>Calamity and Reform in China<\/span><\/i> (1996), Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun\u2019s <\/span>China\u2019s Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 1955-59<\/span><\/i> (1999), and Yang Jisheng\u2019s <\/span>Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962<\/span><\/i> (2008).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The key to this new book is that it takes the reader back into the decades before the Communist Party seized power in 1949. That era is often depicted as a kind of heroic \u2018Robin Hood\u2019 era of the party. It was no such thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dik\u00f6tter shows us how destructive and murderous a force it was and how its ascent to national power was soaked in the blood of ordinary Chinese people and facilitated by Stalin\u2019s funding and provision of arms.<\/span><\/p>\n

The American Trotskyist Harold R. Isaacs (1910-1986) was a witness to the evolution of the Chinese communist movement in the 1930s. In 1938, he published a book called <\/span>The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution<\/span><\/i>. He meant, at that point, the direction of the Chinese communist movement from Moscow by Stalin, leading to a crushing of the movement by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927-33.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a preface to a first revised edition of his book in 1951, Isaacs wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

Between their defeat in China, in 1927, and their victory, in 1949, the Chinese Communists grew into a force capable only of imposing a new totalitarian dictatorship upon China. In the same interim, Russia, in that day still an adolescent tyranny, has grown into a totalitarian monster, imposing its great weight not only upon China but upon the whole world.<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Dik\u00f6tter gives us in <\/span>Red Dawn Over China<\/span><\/i><\/a> is the historical drama of that development playing out. To read it closely is to engage in the great debate.<\/span><\/p>\n

His book\u2019s title seems to echo or rather respond to the famous <\/span>Red Star Over China<\/span><\/i> of Edgar Snow (1905-1972), also first published in 1938, which presented a highly influential image of Mao Zedong and his movement as social justice warriors of a philosophical and visionary nature.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There were multiple subsequent editions, but when Snow died in 1972 Mao was still alive and had caused repeated calamities in China. Snow remained an unblushing admirer of Mao.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stuart Schram, in his 1966\/67 biographical study <\/span>Mao Tse-tung<\/span><\/i>, estimated the executions of \u2018counter-revolutionaries\u2019 in 1951-52 alone to have numbered around two million \u2013 which he thought \u201cnot an enormously large toll for a social revolution of this magnitude\u201d. It would be the equivalent of around a million executions, under \u2018revolutionary justice\u2019, in the United States in the 2020s. Absorb that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What remains to be understood is that enormous numbers died as a direct result of communist terror and warfare <\/span>before<\/span><\/i> 1949. Dik\u00f6tter details that. He then gives us, in three chapters, the steps by which Mao created a totalitarian war machine and overthrew a Nationalist government weakened by the long (1937-45) war with Japan and betrayed by an American government whose view of the communists was shaped by propagandists like Edgar Snow.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

His preface emphatically underscores the reality that the history of three decades before 1949 bears very little resemblance to the version of it propagated by the Chinese communists and their fellow-travellers since the 1930s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three statements warrant excerpting here, as indicating where the critical inquiry is anchored:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026what becomes abundantly clear in one document after another is how marginal the Communist Party was in the history of China from its foundation in 1921 to the end of the Second World War in 1945.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The Communists did not wait until victory in 1949 to expunge the record and control the narrative.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

A whole range of alternative voices, including a rich tradition of democratic thought and practice that ran throughout republican China, has been relegated to the shadows after 1949.<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Are you concerned about Xi\u2019s China? Read Dik\u00f6tter and deepen your grasp of a complex and contested history, which underpins important claims in the China and geopolitics debate of our time.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Published on 10 March 2026.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

If you wish to republish this original article, please attribute to Rationale. Click here to find out more about republishing under Creative Commons.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Photo by Markus Winkler <\/a><\/i><\/b>on Unsplash.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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