‘Red Dawn Over China’ by Frank Dikötter review

Frank Dikötter began his career by writing about modern China in the era before the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war in 1949. His Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) was a pioneering study of the early 20th century as the Qing dynasty collapsed and new ideas about modernity and identity were seeping into the republic that eventually rose from the ashes of the old imperial system. Dikötter developed his thesis in studies such as The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (2008), a solidly revisionist retelling of a period largely seen as chaotic, dysfunctional, and doomed, but which in his reinterpretation showed nascent signs of democracy and the very initial development of civil society. In the last decade or so, Dikötter’s attention has shifted to what happened after the Communists cameto power. A trilogy, described by his publisher as a ‘people’s history’ and concluding in 2016 with The Cultural Revolution, covered the great famines of the early 1960s, the early years of the People’s Republic of China, and then the Cultural Revolution and period up until 1976 when the reforms occurred which have served to create the China we are encountering today: strong and confident, but wounded and haunted by its often traumatic past.

Across his works, Dikötter has presented a view of the effect communism has had on China that is unremittingly dark and negative. There have been times when reading his work has seemed like reading a lengthy denunciation rather than analytic, considered history. Thankfully, despite the somewhat ominous ‘conquered’ in the subtitle, in his latest book Dikötter is once again writing about the pre-1949 era, and he does so with confidence, fluency, and – importantly – balance.

Red Dawn Over China is a narrative account bookended by the May Fourth protests against colonisation in 1919 and the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949. The epic quality of this period, with titanic struggles firstly among forces within China and then, from 1931, with the Japanese, means it is easy to be overwhelmed with the sheer scale. But Dikötter is good at presenting his reader with a ground-level vision of how things unfolded, and deploys first-hand accounts from British, French, and American witnesses who were there.

As China emerged from the period of deepest colonial interference in the late 19th and early 20th century, it went through a monumental, searingly painful attempt to modernise both its administrative system and also its worldview. Ideas, from republicanism to communism, swirled in the country’s intellectual atmosphere, with the latter largely supported by the Soviet Union after 1917. In his analysis of the 1920s Dikötter demonstrates just how impactful not just the ideology of Marxism was, but the practice of it through Leninism, with its stress on class struggle and violent removal of current rulers. This was far from just the preserve of the tiny group of committed communists that existed then (the CCP was founded in Shanghai in 1921). The Nationalists, or Kuomintang, who became a largely nationwide government from the mid-1920s, were also influenced by Moscow, and for much of the decade they worked in an uneasy coalition with the Communists. Those blurred lines where personnel, including Mao Zedong, shifted between either party, came back to haunt China decades later, when loyalties were questioned and the People’s Republic was convulsed by attempts to dig out the so-called ‘enemies within’. But in the 1920s, in view of the almost perpetual crisis the country was facing economically and in terms of its governance, pretty much anything went.

Dikötter likes to serve up his history with a good dose of moral judgement, but it is largely tempered in this work. The one subject on which he does make trenchant comments is the Communists’ involvement in high levels of violence as they evolved and grew through the late 1920s into the 1930s. That the CCP regarded force as a legitimate means of pursuing their political aims is no secret, from attacking landlords in Communist-controlled areas to executing those accused of treachery. But this was by no means something that arose as an intrinsic part of their identity. Their case requires a little more mitigation than is offered here. Until 1925 the Communists were largely fighting for their existence, and were more often than not victims rather than victimisers. The vicious onslaughts against them, the worst of which were conducted by the Nationalists, who murdered 5,000 CCP members in 1925 alone, provide at least some explanation for why Mao in particular embraced the doctrine of using force as a defence and a response. As he famously wrote early in his career, revolution ‘is not a dinner party’. Refinement and delicacy would not achieve anything – least of all preventing the group he came to lead in the mid-1930s from being exterminated. It was largely through deployment of violence that he rose to power, but by no means did he have a monopoly on it. The tragedy of China over the period Dikötter covers in this study is that almost everyone was involved in the violence. It was a time of widespread upheaval, and the levels of bloodshed across society were high. The Communists were schooled in this environment, but they did not create it.

Dikötter’s sympathies in the end are rightly with China’s millions of farmers and peasants who were the real victims of the period. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 they were, he writes, ‘trapped by the Communists or the Japanese’ and ‘inevitably paid the price’. But one aspect he accurately sees as specific to the way the Communists operated in China was the manner in which they forced those villagers to have ‘blood on their hands’ and become complicit in what were later called ‘rectification campaigns’, attacks against landlords, and ‘struggle campaigns’. That, he writes wryly, was a habit the CCP maintained into the 1970s, two decades after coming to power.

• Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity
  Frank Dikötter
  Bloomsbury, 384pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.