BOOK REVIEW: Red Dawn Over China How Communism Conquered a Quarter of a Humanity
By Frank Dikötter / Bloomsbury Publishing
Reviewed by: Martin Petersen
The Reviewer: Martin Petersen is a CIA veteran, Asia expert, and a Cipher Brief Expert. He is the author of City of Lost Souls, a Mystery set in Shanghai in 1932. A sequel is expected in late 2026 or early 2027.
REVIEW — Frank Dikötter has set himself a difficult task—to explain how the Chinese Communists came to power in just over 270 pages in his book “Red Dawn Over China.” The challenge is compounded by the fact that Dikötter has chosen to focus on two aspects of the story: Moscow’s critical assistance to the Chinese Communist Party and the Party’s very brutal history in its march to power.
Both of these elements were critical but, in my opinion, by focusing so intensely on these two aspects, Dikötter has distorted their importance. To be fair, he touches on many of the other factors but in passing: the difficulty the Nationalists had in uniting the country, the contribution of foreign dominance to the raise of Chinese nationalism, the aggression of Japan, the impact of the global depression on the Chinese economy, the corruption and misrule of the Nationalist regime, etc.
Dikötter has broken the story into eight neat segments taking the reader from the roots of the party’s founding to its ultimate military victory in 1949. The book’s maps are very helpful in tracking the story and the author has made extensive use of Western and Chinese sources. There are a lot of names—people, places, and incidents—as you would expect in so sweeping a tale. But it becomes repetitive: Moscow sends people or money, the Communists take over an area, brutalize the population, and move on. I do not minimize the accuracy or importance of this. But the repetitiveness is boring after a bit.
The “then this happened” style narrative is also frustrating because there is so much more to the story, especially the fight for the control of the CCP by Mao and others against the faction sent and backed by Stalin, who was driven in large measure by his own struggle to consolidate his power in Russia. I think the book falls between two stools: too many names, places and events for the casual reader interested in how the Chinese revolution happened and not enough detail for someone who brings considerable knowledge to the book. For that second reader, I am not sure there is anything new in Red Dawn Over China.
I recommend the following books (some of them quite old now) for readers who want to understand the Chinese revolution, a precursor to understanding China (and Xi) of today: The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spense (1990) is a very readable and sweeping narrative of China’s struggle “to stand up” from the Qing Dynasty to the start of the Deng Xiaoping era. Origins of the Chinese Revolution 1915-1949 by Lucien Bianco (1971) is an excellent examination of the intellectual roots of Chinese Communism and the role of nationalism. Moscow and the Chinese Communists by Robert C. North (1953 and 1962) is a detailed rendering of the complex, duplicitous, and often hostile relationship between Stalin and the men who contended for control of the party. And Mao the Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (2005) is biography that is absolutely chilling in its portrayal of man.
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