“Book review: Red Dawn Over China by Frank Dikötter”, Open the magazine, March 26, 2026
“THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION was not a revolution but a coup. The triumph of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong was not inevitable either. It was not the culmination of a popular movement riding the inexorable forces of history. It was a slow and cynical seizure of power through years of ruthless violence, mass murder, deception and manipulation, helped by foreign states, willing friends and unwitting foes.
Historian Frank Dikötter made his name underscoring the bloodshed that has accompanied every turn in communist China’s story, before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Red Dawn over China is a prequel to the trilogy Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016). Here, Dikötter critiques the history of its rise to power as told by the Party and the acceptance of this narrative by Western historians. The title is a play on Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China (1937) which created the Mao legend for the world and made him a household name in China.
For one, from its foundation in 1921 till the end of World War II in 1945, the CCP was utterly marginal to Chinese politics. Before 1940, the Party had one member per 1,700 of the population. When they went underground in 1927, the communists had only 2,600 members in a population of 20 million. Let alone France or Germany, even Salazar’s repressive Portugal had 25,000 communists in 1934. Chinese communists numbered roughly what their counterparts in the US did, a country never at the forefront of the global communist project……”
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