Historian Frank Dikotter on the Origins of Mao’s Communist China

On Tuesday, January 27th, Prof. Frank Dikotter gave a talk on his forthcoming book, “Red Dawn Over China: How Com­munism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity,” which will be pub­lished on February 24th. As is easy to infer from the title, the talk served as an overview of the findings from his book, which serves as a detailed history of the Communist Party in China, its early problems, eventual rise, and the catastrophic human cost of Communist rule in China, es­pecially under Mao, measured in the tens of millions.

Now, I’m not going to be able to do this justice, but I will give my best to provide the overview that Dikotter provided us, and hopefully that will be enough to encourage the Review’s reader­ship to consider purchasing this sorely needed piece of history. It is rare for the true rise of the Communist Party to be outlined clearly in American classrooms, especially when the CCP of Chi­na today is such a convoluted thing to describe; in some ways, it retains a lot of the same brutal­ity as it did when it was founded, on the other hand, its reliance on technocracy over ideology in recent decades paints a compli­cated picture for anybody who wants a crystal-clear definition of the word “communism.”

Dikotter began by discussing the early, modest history of the Communist Party in China. In­deed, the CCP as we know it to­day began in the 1920s, and its membership was vastly weaker than that of its primary oppo­sition, the Nationalists in Chi­na. It would not be for nearly three decades before the Chinese Communist Party became the dominant party in China, and it would take the involvement of their communist friends to the north, the Soviets, to make this happen.

Military cooperation between the Soviets and the Chinese in the early 1920s gave the CCP a lifeline; the Soviets offered sup­port to the Nationalists, provid­ed that the Nationalists accepted Chinese communists into their ranks. When that alliance came to an end, military aid did as well, and the communists were subsequently expelled from the ranks and reduced to the fring­es. In 1927, the nationalists in China expelled the communists from any rank of power in Chi­na; indeed, this looked like it would be the end for the bare­ly-burgeoning party. 

The Communist Party, over the following months, largely re­treated to the mountains and the countryside (this is part of the reason that Mao’s revolution was largely centered in the fields). 

It is emphasized by Dikotter that the CCP did not flourish due to any substantively prolific economic structure, but rather by plunder. He emphasized the extent to which the Chinese re­lied on coercing poor Chinese farmers (who were entirely reli­ant on subsistence farming) into giving forth a part of their har­vest to further the party’s ambi­tions.

Perhaps the most compelling part of Dikotter’s speech was when he took time to actively dispel the myth of a righteous and just Maoist revolution. He spent a lot of time discussing the coercive and violent methods of forcing the supposed “revolu­tionaries” into compliance with their measures. This is in con­tradistinction to the idea that all those who died for Mao’s Revo­lution were truly willing to die; perhaps this is more explanato­ry of why so many marched in Mao’s army than is the myth of a grandiose, alluring revolution­ary who inspired the destitute countryside.

The CCP came to power in large part due to a series of false promises to the peasants, to which they were attempting to appeal. For instance, the CCP claimed to support the preser­vation of private property and an entirely free press. Of course, this failed to come to fruition in any form, as the CCP would purge members of the press and forcibly seize all forms of pro­duction made on what were sup­posed to be “private” lands.

At the end of the Second World War, the CCP remained relatively weak. Therefore, the question of how they came to power despite their position is explained by the declaration of war by the Soviet Union on Ja­pan in 1945, and its subsequent invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria. The Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in August of 1945, and CCP forces moved in and took Japanese arms with Soviet help.

All of this was further cement­ed when the U.S. came into the equation. General George Mar­shall, the namesake and practical architect of the Marshall Plan, pushed for negotiations between both major factions in the Chi­nese government. Meanwhile, the U.S. at large imposed an arms shipment suspension from July 1946 to May 1947, further diminishing their grip on power. All of this was fertile ground for a violent and bloody Civil War.

The Communists, having been armed by the Soviets, were wag­ing war against a weakened Na­tionalist government, which had to govern a country that was, in Dikotter’s words, “the size of Europe.” The Nationalists were susceptible to the brutal and ci­vilian-targeted attacks by Mao’s army. Mao had a seemingly un­ending supply of civilians that he was willing to put forward as fodder, and eventually, the sheer numbers overwhelmed what the Nationalists could match.

I am no expert on the history of China, but perhaps I will be one day should I continue to en­gage with Dikotter’s work. This talk served as a very compelling argument for further engage­ment with the study of the re­gion, and I, for one, will be first in line for whatever comes next from Prof. Dikotter. Perhaps when the his book is released in a few week’s time, it too will merit a review in The Review.