Frank Dikötter — How Communism Won China
Historian Frank Dikötter presents his research on how the Communist Party seized power in China, drawing on decades of archival work across the country.
Why we picked this
Dikötter's archival access to Chinese Communist Party records is virtually unmatched among Western historians — this is primary-source history that rewrites the standard narrative.
Frank Dikötter spent years traveling to provincial archives across China, reading internal party documents, secret police files, and local records that had been largely inaccessible to outside researchers. The result was a trilogy — “Mao’s Great Famine,” “The Tragedy of Liberation,” and “The Cultural Revolution” — that fundamentally reshaped the historical understanding of Communist China. His work relies not on secondhand accounts or ideological argument but on the party’s own paperwork, which makes the scale of what he documents all the more difficult to dismiss.
His newest book turns to the earlier question: how did the Communist Party win in the first place? The standard account emphasizes military victory and peasant mobilization. Dikötter’s archival findings complicate that picture considerably, examining the coercion, propaganda, and systematic dismantling of civil society that preceded the formal 1949 victory. It is history written from the bottom up, using evidence that the party itself generated and largely preferred to keep buried.
Asia Society is one of the few venues in New York that regularly brings this caliber of China scholarship to a public audience. For anyone trying to understand the foundations of the system that governs one-fifth of the world’s population, hearing Dikötter present his findings in person is a rare opportunity.