How Communism conquered China

Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury, £21

Frank Dikötter has made a career out of forcing western readers to confront the catastrophic human costs of Chinese Communism. His ‘People’s Trilogy’ – Mao’s Great Famine, The Tragedy of Liberation, and The Cultural Revolution – marshalled provincial and county archives with devastating effect, painting the Maoist era not as a misguided experiment but as a sustained campaign of violence against China’s own people. Whatever one thought of Dikötter’s interpretive choices, no serious reader could dismiss the archival spadework. With Red Dawn Over China, a prequel covering the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) journey from its founding in 1921 to its conquest of the mainland in 1949, Dikötter promises to deliver the same revelatory treatment to an earlier chapter. The title itself is a deliberate inversion of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, the book that more than any other fixed the romantic image of Mao and his guerrillas in the western imagination. Dikötter’s ambition is clear: to replace the myth with the archive. The question is whether he succeeds.

The book’s central claim rests on a cache of primary sources. In the preface, Dikötter announces that ‘the Central Party Archives, under the control of the Central Committee, working in collaboration with provincial archives from every corner of the country, produced well over 300 volumes containing original Party documents from 1923 to 1949’. These volumes, he explains, ‘were printed in a limited edition with restricted circulation, meaning that they were intended for the eyes of senior Party members only’. He adds that the collection ‘represents an unparalleled foundation for anyone wishing to unearth more about the history of the Communist Party’, yet ‘somewhat paradoxically, it has had only sporadic use by historians’.

This is a bold claim – and a misleading one. The collection Dikötter describes has in fact been widely used by Chinese Party historians for decades. The volumes have long since been digitised, scanned into PDF format, and circulated on the Chinese internet. Any graduate student in modern Chinese history at a competent university in Beijing or Shanghai can download them. The Party’s own authoritative journal of record, Journal of the CPC History (Chinese:中共党史研究), has even published methodological articles devoted to improving scholarly use of this corpus – a sure sign of its integration into mainstream academic practice.

These documents are, in short, the bread and butter of the Chinese Party history establishment, extensively cited not only by regime-approved scholars but also by the country’s liberal historians and by its thriving community of unofficial, independent researchers, many of whom have published penetrating critiques of the CCP’s official narrative at considerable personal risk.

As for Dikötter’s use of Soviet-era sources – the Comintern archives in Moscow, the dispatches of Soviet advisers – these, too, have been available to scholars since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. An entire generation of Cold War historians, from Alexander Pantsov to Odd Arne Westad to Chen Jian, has built a substantial literature on Moscow’s role in shaping Chinese Communism. The notion that Soviet involvement was the decisive variable, rather than a background condition, was articulated as early as 1950 by Hu Shih in an essay for Foreign Affairs, ‘China in Stalin’s Grand Strategy’. The arguments Dikötter presents as revelations – that the CCP was Moscow’s creature, that the Long March was a desperate rout rather than a triumphal epic, that Mao’s promises of democracy were cynical fabrications – have been the common currency of serious scholarship for at least 30 years. To an academic audience, there is little here that is new.

This raises a question about the intended audience. Dikötter is writing, as he has always done, for the educated general reader in the English-speaking world: the person who might pick up a book on modern China at an airport bookshop, or who subscribes to a broadsheet and wishes to understand why the world’s second-most populous country is governed by a Leninist party. For such a reader, much of what Red Dawn contains will indeed be unfamiliar and even shocking. The problem is that Dikötter presents his material not as a synthesis of existing knowledge but as a fresh excavation. His previous works, whatever their critics said about selective use of evidence, could legitimately claim to have unearthed material that had not been widely seen outside China. Red Dawn cannot make the same claim with a straight face. The ‘300 volumes’ are not hidden treasure; they are a well-thumbed library.

Dikötter’s argument also erects what can only be called a straw man. In the preface, he takes aim at what he characterises as the dominant narrative of Chinese Communist history: ‘Whether scholarly volumes or popular books on the history of modern China, the narrative is all too often dominated by the Communist Party. At times it seems like a fairy tale: the country is racked by an unholy alliance of “imperialist powers” and “reactionary forces,” the Communists mobilize 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.’ He insists that ‘at heart it follows the historical vision of the Chinese Communist Party’. But who, exactly, still believes this fairy tale? Certainly not most western academics who study modern China, and who have spent decades picking apart exactly the kind of triumphal narrative Dikötter ascribes to them. The CCP’s own official history is believed, in its full form, by a shrinking constituency: regime loyalists, opportunistic intellectuals who know which side their bread is buttered on, and a small, ageing cohort of western Marxists for whom the Chinese Revolution retains a certain nostalgic glow. Dikötter writes as though he is storming a fortress, but it is one that has been largely abandoned.

This is not to say that the book is without value. The sheer compression of the narrative – eight chapters covering 28 years of revolution, civil war, foreign invasion, social mobilisation and ideological transformation – means that even a reader familiar with the period will find useful reminders of events that have dropped out of popular memory. Dikötter is right to highlight the Sino-Soviet War of 1929, ‘the largest military conflagration between China and a European power ever fought on Chinese soil’, and right to note that it has been systematically ignored. He is right, also, to draw attention to the massacre at Xiwanzi, where retreating Communists slaughtered over a thousand villagers, many of them Catholic, in December 1946 – an event he aptly calls a ‘Little Lidice’. He is correct to insist on the centrality of Soviet material support in transforming the CCP from a ragged guerrilla force into a modern army. And his account of the siege of Changchun in 1948, where Lin Biao ordered that the city be turned into ‘a city of death’ and at least 150,000 civilians starved during a five-month blockade, is grimly powerful. For instance, Lin Biao reported to Mao of refugees who ‘knelt in front of our troops in large groups and begged us to let them through’, and that soldiers who took pity on the starving were disciplined, while others resorted to the ‘beating, tying up and shooting of refugees’. Such details deserve to be known.

It is a shame, therefore, that the book’s format works against its strengths. Previously, Dikötter was a storyteller. Mao’s Great Famine succeeded not only because of its archival depth but because of its narrative power: the vivid portraits of local officials, the harrowing anecdotes of individual suffering, the sense of a vast human catastrophe apprehended through intimate detail. To use a comparison from English-language military history, the earlier Dikötter wrote like Antony Beevor – the sweep of great events rendered through the experiences of individuals, with a novelist’s eye for the telling scene. Red Dawn, by contrast, reads more like David M. Glantz: a relentless chronological catalogue of who did what, where, and when, studded with facts and figures but largely devoid of the human texture that makes history come alive. There is a compulsive listing quality to the prose – a new character appears, does something, disappears; a battle is fought, casualties are tallied, the narrative moves on. The problem is that Dikötter lacks Glantz’s compensating virtue: meticulous operational precision. To cover the founding of the CCP, the Northern Expedition, the Jiangxi Soviet, the Long March, the Yan’an period, the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War in 300 pages of text is, to be blunt, a mission impossible. The result is a book that skims where it should dive, and catalogues where it should narrate.

This thinness is most damaging in areas where Dikötter ventures beyond his expertise. He is, by training and temperament, a social and cultural historian. His feel for the texture of daily life under Communist rule – the denunciation meetings, the classification of villagers into ‘class’ categories, the petty tyrannies of local cadres – is vivid and often devastating. But when the book turns to military and diplomatic history, it stumbles badly.

On the military side, Dikötter is content to explain the CCP’s victory largely through the application of terror, attrition and ‘human wave’ tactics. This is not wrong, exactly, but it is radically incomplete. The Communist victory in the civil war was a feat of strategic planning, intelligence gathering and operational flexibility that cannot be reduced to sheer brutality and demographic expenditure. The CCP’s intelligence apparatus had penetrated the Nationalist high command to a remarkable degree: senior Nationalist generals and staff officers were passing operational plans directly to Communist commanders. This is not an obscure finding – it has been documented in both Chinese and western sources – but it receives little attention in Red Dawn. The irony is that this intelligence success itself reflected the ideological appeal of Communism to Chinese elites, a phenomenon Dikötter seems reluctant to engage with. If the CCP was as marginal and unpopular as he insists, how did it recruit so many agents at the very heart of the enemy’s command structure?

This leads to a larger gap in the book’s argument. Dikötter is emphatic that ‘communism was never popular in China, no more so than in Finland or in the United States, and it was brought to the population at the barrel of a gun’. He uses membership statistics to drive the point home: for example, in Gansu province, a region of nearly seven million people, the Party claimed just 264 adherents in 1939, and, after an internal purge, membership dropped to 143. These are striking figures. But they reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how Leninist vanguard parties actually work. The entire point of a Leninist organisation is that revolution is not a mass democratic enterprise; it is an act of disciplined, elite-led mobilisation. A small cadre of committed revolutionaries organises, agitates, and when necessary, coerces a far larger population into action. The CCP’s organisational structure, learned directly from the Soviet model, was purpose-built for this task.

In a country like China, with its vast illiterate peasantry, its fragmented political landscape, and its weak civil society, revolution was always going to be a top-down affair. That the Party was numerically tiny does not mean it was irrelevant; it means it was operating exactly as Lenin prescribed. Dikötter seems to treat low membership as evidence that Communism had no purchase in Chinese society, when in fact it is evidence that the Leninist model was functioning as designed: a small, disciplined vanguard mobilising and directing a vastly larger population through a combination of ideological appeal, organisational superiority and coercive violence. Compared to its rivals – the Nationalists, the warlords, the regional power-holders – the CCP was more efficient, more ruthless and more ‘modern’ in its methods of mass mobilisation.

Equally disappointing is Dikötter’s failure to account for the genuine ideological magnetism of the Communist cause among China’s educated classes. He acknowledges that ‘many thousands of students, teachers, artists, writers and journalists poured into Yan’an’, and that ‘the vast majority were idealists, young volunteers keen to fight for equality, justice and freedom’. He records Mao’s cynical promises of democracy: ‘We do not have the slightest intention of promoting a proletarian revolution with dictatorship’, Mao told a Dutch visitor; instead, Dikötter writes, the Chairman ‘claimed his aim was to build a new democratic republic where all classes enjoy equal rights’. But having acknowledged this, Dikötter never truly grapples with the question of why so many of China’s best and brightest were drawn to a movement that Dikötter himself portrays as little more than a criminal enterprise sustained by Soviet money and guns. The answer, of course, is complex: it involves the genuine failures of the Nationalist government, the appeal of a modernising ideology in a semi-colonial society, the attraction of internationalism and egalitarianism in an era of global upheaval, and the CCP’s skill at presenting itself as the bearer of national salvation. But Red Dawn has no room for this kind of analysis. It is too busy tallying atrocities.

On the diplomatic front, Dikötter’s critique of America’s China policy during the Truman years is similarly one-dimensional. He is scathing about George C. Marshall’s mission to China, describing the general as ‘just about the least fitting man to send to China’ and deploring the arms embargo that the United States imposed on the Nationalists. He writes that Marshall ‘still believed that the Communists were not doctrinaire ideologists, but merely rural reformers who could help shape a democratic China’, and implies that with better American judgement, the outcome might have been different. There is something to this: to a certain degree, US policy then was indeed shaped by a persistent misreading of the CCP’s nature, but Dikötter’s account ignores the powerful structural constraints under which American policymakers operated. The United States, having just concluded the most destructive war in human history, had no appetite for another major military commitment in Asia. Demobilisation was proceeding at breakneck speed. The strategic consensus, articulated most influentially by George Kennan, held that the vital interests of the United States in Asia were confined to Japan, the only major industrial power in the region. Europe was the central theatre of the emerging Cold War, and the Marshall Plan represented the overwhelming priority. Even if American officials had correctly identified Mao as a devoted Leninist revolutionary rather than a nationalist reformer, it is far from clear that they could have persuaded Congress and the American public to underwrite the kind of massive military intervention in China’s civil war that would have been required to save Chiang Kai-shek’s government.

The book’s emphasis on Soviet influence in shaping the Chinese revolution is, in one sense, its strongest thread. Dikötter traces Moscow’s hand from the very founding of the CCP, through the torturous alliances and betrayals of the 1920s and 1930s, to the decisive Soviet intervention in Manchuria in 1945-46 that transformed the military balance. He quotes extensively from sources to show how Soviet money, advisers and weaponry sustained the Chinese Communist movement through its darkest hours. This is important and well-documented, but, here again, the argument echoes a position that was articulated during the earliest years of the Cold War and has been substantially refined by post-1989 scholarship using the very archives Dikötter draws upon. Scholars such as Odd Arne Westad, Kuisong Yang, Zhihua Shen and Sergey Radchenko, among many others, have offered sophisticated analyses of the Moscow-Yan’an relationship that give full weight to Soviet influence without reducing the Chinese revolution to a mere satellite operation. Dikötter’s account, by contrast, sometimes reads as though the CCP were simply Moscow’s franchise in East Asia, a characterisation that obscures as much as it illuminates.

What is missing, finally, is a sense of proportion and intellectual generosity. Dikötter ends his preface with a sweeping verdict: ‘The Chinese Communist Party, not least their Chairman, became more determined than their opponents in carrying out unrestricted warfare, devoid of any rules. They excelled in a very traditional pursuit of power, prevailing over their opponents through the amoral application of military strategy.’ This is true as far as it goes. But a revolution that conquered a quarter of humanity cannot be explained solely by the ruthlessness of its leaders and the gullibility of foreign observers. The CCP won because it was, by the standards of its time and place, a formidably effective political organisation: more disciplined than the Nationalists, better at mobilising the countryside, more adept at propaganda, more skilled at exploiting the catastrophic dislocations of foreign invasion and civil war. It won, too, because its ideology, however fraudulent its promises, spoke to real grievances in a society convulsed by imperialism, poverty and political fragmentation. And it won because, as the book’s own evidence sometimes inadvertently shows, it attracted a remarkable cadre of talented and committed individuals, many of whom would later become its victims. A history that reduces this complex story to a litany of violence and deception may satisfy those who already view the CCP as irredeemable, but it will not satisfy those who seek to understand how and why China came to live under Communist rule.

Red Dawn Over China will find its readers, and many of them will learn things they did not know. As a corrective to the lingering sentimentalism of the Edgar Snow tradition, it has its uses. But measured against the standard Dikötter set with his earlier work – and measured against the scholarship that already exists on this period – it is a disappointment. The archive is less novel than advertised, the argument more familiar than claimed, and the narrative, for all its grim detail, curiously bloodless where it should be alive. The straw man burns brightly, but the real story remains, in many of its most important dimensions, untold.