By Brian Stewart
Sunday, March 22, 2026
It is hardly a great secret that contemporary Western
scholarship on China leaves much to be desired. Recent interest in the Middle
Kingdom has seldom generated historical inquiries that draw heavily from
primary sources or inform readers about what is not already well known about
the founding of the People’s Republic. Most accounts disclose a tendency to
recycle well-worn narratives, producing a literature that, however expansive,
feels stale and incomplete.
One of the rare exceptions comes courtesy of Frank
Dikötter, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of humanities at
the University of Hong Kong. In his new Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of
Humanity, Dikötter brings new material to light and furnishes a
corrective to several reigning myths about China’s rise. It is a work of
startling originality that demands a wide readership.
The subject is hardly new to Dikötter. After writing a
gripping “people’s trilogy” of the Chinese Revolution in the 2010s, he
published China After Mao in 2022, which argued that the genuine
architect of China’s economic miracle was not Deng Xiaoping — the celebrated
leader from 1978 to 1989, who first opened the Chinese system to the global
market — but rather Jiang Zemin, president from 1993 to 2003. Jiang’s crowning
achievement, wrote Dikötter, was China’s entry into the World Trade
Organization in 2001, without which Beijing’s model of state capitalism would
never have flourished.
In Red Dawn over China, Dikötter takes evident
pleasure in puncturing what he calls the fairy tale embedded in the Chinese
Communist Party’s narrative of its ascent to power: the story of a communist
David, personified by Mao Zedong, versus a nationalist Goliath, the Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek. Perhaps never has this canonical version of the party’s
history been so thoroughly debunked as it is in these pages.
Dikötter portrays the Maoist fable as a straightforward
morality tale. It begins with the triumph in 1949 of the Chinese Communist
Party, established in 1921 under the tutelage of Russia’s Bolsheviks. In the
official account, a potent correlation of forces, foreign and domestic, was
holding China back. Against this “unholy alliance of ‘imperialist powers’ and
‘reactionary forces,’” the story goes, the communists mobilized the peasants by
taking the land from the rich and distributing it to the poor, before gradually
uniting the people “in their fight against the Japanese invader and the fascist
Nationalist Party.” In the end, “nobody remains standing except Mao, armed with
ideological conviction.” The CCP “liberates” the country and brings an ignoble
chapter of Chinese history to a dramatic close.
This theme of abject humiliation followed by
unprecedented triumph is in keeping with Mao’s “historical vision,” Dikötter
tells us, but it hits a snag: It isn’t true. Mao’s global reputation as a
leader after 1949 has suffered grievously on account of the millions of his
countrymen whom he and his revolutionaries consigned to shallow graves. But
Dikötter insists that the moral rot began much earlier, when Mao was presumed
by contemporaries and even many modern historians to have been a youthful
idealist who proposed an ambitious model for a progressive society.
Studying more than 300 volumes of original party
documents dating from 1923 to 1949 — published by China’s Central Party
Archives in the ’80s — Dikötter uncovers “how marginal the Communist Party was
in the history of China” between its inception and the end of World War II.
This collection of data represents “an unparalleled foundation” for experts as
well as lay students of the history of the Communist Party, however at odds it
may be with official CCP script. Dikötter burnishes these findings by digging into
the archives of the Nationalist Party in Taiwan, as well as the holdings of the
Comintern on China that were made available after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Dikötter’s comprehensive research has uncovered that,
prior to World War II, “almost every European country, with the exception of
Nazi Germany, boasted a larger number of Communists as a proportion of their
overall population than any province in China.” Party membership across the
country was beyond paltry. To pluck one example, in Wuxi, an industrial city
with 100,000 workers, west of Shanghai, the party had only 25 members in 1929.
The picture was not much brighter in poorer provinces that might be expected to
have been more receptive to the communist creed. In the dilapidated province of
Gansu (population 6.7 million) in 1939, the party claimed a mere 264 adherents.
Because of these puny tallies, local communists ended up
doctoring their membership logs to maintain the flow of support from domestic
central authorities and, far behind them, the Kremlin. Party documents show
that membership statistics were deliberately inflated to garner resources — a
habit that may justify some doubt about the reliability of Chinese economic and
military figures today. In sum, before 1940, no more than 1 in 1,700 Chinese
was a communist, a rate roughly equivalent to communist membership in the U.S.
— “a country not generally considered a leader in the world Communist
movement.”
Under the weight of this data, it becomes hard to escape
the conclusion that the communists took power not through a confluence of
social forces or through mass ideological conversion but rather through violent
subjugation. Dikötter attributes their sweeping success above all to the Red
Tsar, Joseph Stalin, who armed and funded them and, on the heels of the
Japanese surrender in late summer 1945, dispatched a million-strong army to
Manchuria to shore up his beleaguered ideological brethren. This contingent of
Soviet troops stayed long enough to stymie “the central government of Chiang
Kai-shek, quietly handing over the countryside to the Communists and helping
Mao transform his guerrilla fighters into a formidable fighting machine.” The
feat of conquering a vast country was accomplished by the most sordid and
unscrupulous methods. Under the command of Mao, Lin Biao, and other communist
generals, the party “left a trail of destruction, surviving on loot and ransom
as they laid siege to towns, burning government buildings, killing so-called
‘class enemies,’ seizing their property and distributing it to the troops.”
Word of the party’s depredations spread across the
countryside. Soon, vast numbers of Chinese took flight to escape the
communists’ barbarity and terror. “Despite all the widely advertised merits of
the Chinese Communist Party,” says Dikötter, “nowhere during the civil war did
anyone ever witness people fleeing a region controlled by the [Nationalist]
government towards the Communists.” The human train of refugees — a symbol of
Cold War communist conquest, from Berlin to Korea and from Cuba to Vietnam —
went almost exclusively in one direction.
The brutality and brigandage of Mao’s enterprise knew no
limit. In every village the communists seized, the population was divided and
either conscripted or punished. The villagers were swiftly separated into
landlords, rich peasants, middling peasants, and poor peasants and laborers,
after which they were instructed to “turn hardship into hatred.” And so the
poor dispossessed, beat, and killed the notionally rich. The fact that almost
all of these victims were, by any Western standard, abjectly impoverished
themselves did not save them.
Most readers of National Review will already be
aware of the depressingly counterproductive role played by the stewards of
American power during the Chinese communists’ rise. In December 1945,
President Harry Truman dispatched General George C. Marshall to China for the
purpose of ending the civil war there and forging a coalition government.
“Despite all evidence to the contrary, Marshall still believed,” in Dikötter’s
words, that the communists “were not doctrinaire ideologists, but merely rural
reformers who could help shape a democratic China.” After garnering resentment
for speaking “like a colonial governor” while forcing Chiang’s forces to reach
a truce with the communists, Marshall successfully brokered a cease-fire in
January 1946. Meant to last only a fortnight, it “became a four-month truce
that changed the course of the civil war.” The cease-fire gave the exhausted
communists time to regroup and rearm. Meanwhile, they expanded their reach into
Manchuria, courtesy of Moscow’s largesse. In September 1946, Truman imposed an
arms embargo on the Nationalists, and their flight to Taiwan was a fait
accompli.
The myth of a glorious peasant uprising received
invaluable assistance, writes Dikötter, from pliant foreign correspondents who
acted more as stenographers than journalists, entirely willing to carry water
for the communists. One such naïve sycophant was Edgar Snow, born in Kansas
City, Mo., who had been selected by Mao’s forces “after careful vetting.” In
June 1936, at the conclusion of the Long March — by which the communists had
relocated to northwest China — a young Snow arrived in the province of Shaanxi
to interview Mao. Communist propagandists recorded their encounter in
meticulous detail. The result was a lavish spread of interviews published in
the China Weekly Review in November 1936. But it was Snow’s
groundbreaking book Red Star over China, published the next year, that
“made Mao into a household name and became the basis for all subsequent
accounts of the rise of the Communist Party, and by implication of the history
of modern China.”
Indebted to Snow for its title, Red Dawn over China
is a brilliant history of the consolidation of communist power and of the
staggeringly high cost that this “liberation” has imposed on the Chinese people
ever since. Dikötter shows the extent of the lie on which the communist regime
is founded, and it demonstrates that the CCP remains vulnerable to the
corruption that brought so many of its predecessors to ruin and defeat.
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