Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity
By Benedict Rogers in the Tablet.
Frank Dikötter has been described as “the historian of China”, and one can see why. His previous books offer powerful and incisive analysis of the Mao years and the post-Mao era. This book describes the battle for China’s future between the nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek and the communists led by Mao Zedong, from 1921 until the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It details in compelling narrative the alliances formed and then broken, the Japanese invasion, the civil war and – most significantly – the Soviet Union’s influence in China throughout this period.
Red Dawn Over China ought logically to be read before Dikötter’s previous epic trilogy on the Mao era, which charts the early years of communist rule, the devastating famine during the “Great Leap Forward” and the harrowing Cultural Revolution. It describes in horrific detail the violent nature of the communists during the civil war, in ways which help one understand the catastrophic repression suffered under Mao and the crackdown on human rights in China today.
Dikötter’s title is a deliberate riposte to Edgar Snow’s classic Red Star Over China, published in 1937. Snow, a young American journalist who had been invited by Mao to interview him over several weeks in 1936, wrote a rose-tinted, romantic tale of the idealistic communists fighting for freedom. Dikötter seems determined to let the facts speak for themselves – and the tale is a much uglier one. “What emerges from an evidence-based approach?” he asks. “The key word is violence, and a willingness to inflict it.” The Chinese Communist Party, and Mao particularly, “became more determined than their opponents in carrying out unrestricted warfare, devoid of any rules”.
Dikötter goes on to argue that “violence was not merely incidental to the revolution”, but instrumental in it. Purges, denunciations, incarceration, torture, executions and massacres fill the pages. Mao’s original promise of a multi-party democracy and the protection of private property was “an entirely fictitious programme” driven by Mao’s “formidable propaganda machine”.
But one of the book’s strengths is its objectivity and balance. Dikötter is just as scrupulous in accounting for the brutality of the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. And he reveals a crucial part of that period which is often overlooked: the extent of the Soviet Union’s role in driving China’s path towards communism.
Key Soviet officials – men like Mikhail Borodin and Otto Braun – were sent to China to collaborate initially with Sun Yat-sen and then Chiang Kai-shek, to influence the nationalists towards communism. “It placed political indoctrination above all else,” writes Dikötter. But, as the communist presence strengthened, tensions between them and the nationalists “came to the boil” – and revolution led to civil war.
Moscow’s involvement first came to light in London in 1927, when British police raided the All Russian Co-Operative Society (Arcos), finding documents that included plans to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. It caused London to break off relations with Moscow.
Russian communist influence over the nationalists also led to an intensifying anti- imperialist campaign, causing expulsions of foreigners and attacks on missionaries. “Some churches were painted red,” according to Dikötter, while others were looted or burned. A young woman at the Presbyterian mission in Nanjing was shot twice; another missionary only escaped death when the gun pointed at his head misfired.
The scale of violence intensified as the civil war drew towards an end. In a precursor to the Great Leap Forward, hundreds died every day, trapped in areas between the communists and the nationalists, “reduced to eating grass and leaves, doomed to slow starvation”. In what Dikötter calls “the greatest battle in Chinese history”, the “Huaihai Campaign” saw tanks and heavy artillery deployed by both sides in the fight for the heartland of China. Entire villages were shelled. Meanwhile, the communists forcibly conscripted millions of people, including children,and used them as human shields.
The Communist victory, Dikötter argues, was not achieved by winning hearts and minds – but by a ruthless determination to fight and win, whatever the human cost. The communists, he suggests, had “roughly the same popular appeal as an obscure religious sect or minor secret society” – and “no one ever witnessed people fleeing towards communist-controlled areas”. Mao’s old adage that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun” proved to be the communists’ guiding star and path to victory.
The book ends with a poignant reminder that the communists did not stop at victory in 1949, but immediately invaded East Turkistan, now known as Xinjiang, home to the Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnicities, and then Tibet. Three-quarters of a century later, having acquired Hong Kong and Macau and dismantled their freedoms, Beijing’s sights are now set on Taiwan. To comprehend the remorseless brutality and disregard for humanity that is seared into the character of the Chinese Communist Party, and how it may behave in the future, read this book, and understand how it behaved from its birth.
This article was originally published in the Tablet.