Behind China's red curtain

Frank Dikotter’s Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity is an attempt to write an alternative history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Drawing on extensive archival work, the author constructs a narrative that runs counter to the story promoted by the CCP for the last 80 years. Dikotter argues that “The Party controls history, not only its own but also that of its erstwhile rivals”, and with this book, he offers an alternative lens through which to understand developments in China between 1911 and 1949.

The book examines in detail the birth of the CCP in 1921 and its eventual victory in establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Dikotter also highlights the role played by Western writers in shaping global perceptions of the Communist movement. He writes, “Even as they faced annihilation, the Communists scored a major publicity coup when Edgar Snow, a young reporter from Missouri, published a series of interviews with Mao in the China Weekly Review...introduced as the ‘Chairman of the Chinese Central Soviet Government’”.

This was also one of the most violent periods in Chinese history, and the book offers insight into the major power struggles and the eventual evolution of the CCP. Through data, anecdotal accounts and archival records, Dikotter paints a vivid picture of the scale and intensity of the violence faced by the Chinese people. He challenges mainstream discourse by asserting that this violence was not wielded only by the Nationalist Party and the Japanese; the CCP, too, played a significant role.

The current politics of China under Xi Jinping and the policies adopted by the CCP become easier to understand after reading this book. It provides a fundamental understanding of the Party’s methods and its continued reliance on control and command structures. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign and its transformation into a tool to eliminate opposition, Dikotter suggests, is rooted in the CCP’s earliest years. The author writes, “Purges were intrinsic to a utopian vision of radical transformation, one which could only be brought about by a Party purified of all corrupt elements”.

The CCP’s official narrative has long projected itself as the party of the people, one that rescued exploited Chinese citizens from the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and from Japanese aggression. Dikotter disputes this portrayal. According to the author, this situation had not changed significantly even by 1935.

“The Communists, in short, had roughly the same popular appeal as an obscure religious sect or minor secret society”.

The book also traces the development and evolution of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) under the command and control of the CCP. Dikotter underscores that the Chinese military is fundamentally the Party’s army, functioning as an extension of the CCP itself. It is both a tool of power projection and an instrument for implementing ideology and maintaining internal stability. The roots of this relationship lie in Mao’s own conception of power. 

The book also contests the widely held belief that the Communists played the central role in resisting Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Dikotter argues instead that the CCP remained primarily focused on defeating Chiang Kai-shek. “If there was one overwhelming threat to the country, it was Japan. Yet the Chinese Communist Party, fixated on Chiang Kai-shek, hardly ever mentioned the island nation”, he writes.
Dikötter further argues that the Communist revolution in China was heavily dependent on Soviet support. Through changing phases of bilateral relations, the Soviet Union funded the CCP and influenced many of its policies. Even concepts central to Communist mobilisation, he claims, were externally imported. The idea of the “landlord”, he writes, was “alien … imported from Russia via Japan in the late nineteenth century”.

Unlike Russia, China lacked “an aristocracy living on vast estates cheek by jowl with impoverished peasants only recently emancipated from serfdom”. Yet, ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union later provided the CCP with lessons about the mistakes it needed to avoid in order to ensure its own survival.

The CCP has consistently justified its actions in Tibet and Xinjiang through the language of liberation. Dikotter, however, presents a starkly different interpretation of Communist liberation.

He writes that the Communists “excelled in a very traditional pursuit of power, prevailing over their opponents through the amoral application of military strategy, including every ancient tactic prescribed by Sun Tzu and the other great strategists of the past: feign, lie, deceive, retreat, hit, run, sabotage; view everything as a means to achieving the end. And, when at long last in a position to attack, overwhelm the enemy in a war of relentless attrition. Most of all, believe in the cause”.

This is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the foundations of survival, control and political consolidation that continue to shape the CCP today. More importantly, it punctures the Party’s carefully curated narrative about its birth, struggle and rise to power.