解放的悲劇：中國革命史1945-1957

People's Trilogy #2

by Frank Dikötter, 馮客, 蕭葉 (Translator)

中國共產黨將1949年的勝利稱作「解放」，看到這個詞，人們通常會聯想到興高采烈的群眾湧上街頭慶祝重獲自由的情景。然而在中國，「解放」和「革命」的故事卻與和平、自由及正義無關，而是充滿了精心策劃的恐怖和有組織的暴力。解放後，廣大中國人民面對的是「一座精心設計的奧許維茲思想集中營」。共產黨政權建立不到十年，已經無人敢反對毛主席。

首當其衝的是地主，共產黨在農村發動的土地改革，其實是黨和窮人之間的血腥交易、一場精心策劃的殺戮，導致兩百萬地主遭到清算。接著是鎮壓反革命的恐怖運動，目地是消滅所有黨的敵人，毛澤東甚至設定了殺人指標。為達成殺人指標，幹部們往往只是隨機挑選殺害對象，最後有將近兩百萬人遇害。然後是少數民族、宗教團體、農民、藝術家、企業家、工商業主、教師、學者，以及對各項政策提出質疑的黨員……

《解放的悲劇：中國革命史1945-1957（當代中國史學家馮客三部曲）》的主角就是受到這場巨大災難影響的普通人。他們的故事大多被歷史所淹沒，因為官方的宣傳報導中只充斥著大量領導人的談話，而這些談話只是描述了一個他們想要建成的社會，最多只能算是設計藍圖，並不能反映社會現實，而且通常只提到工人和農民中的模範人物，找不到有血有肉的普通人。

當代中國史學家、《文化大革命：人民的歷史1962-1976》作者馮客擷取近年才得以公開的檔案資料。他所蒐集的數百份來自中國各檔案館、從未解密的檔案文件中，包括祕密警察的報告、未經篡改的高級領導人的演講、在思想改造運動中寫的悔過書、對農村反抗事件的調查報告、鎮反運動的詳細統計資料、工人工作條件的調查、普通人的上訪信件等內容。輔以各種回憶錄、信件和日記，以及親身經歷者的記述，勾勒出那些革命的主要參與者和受害者的真實故事。

那些早期的親歷者所留下的證詞，通常被同情共產黨政權的學者所忽視，但他們的描述如今恰可與檔案資料互相參證，對研究歷史的真相幫助很大。透過這群有血有肉的普通人的故事，讀者獲致前所未有的機會，得以穿透中共宣傳的表相，接櫫毛澤東政權下最慘烈的時代悲劇。

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Politics, Asia, War, World History

416 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 29, 2013

About the author

Frank Dikötter (Chinese: 馮客; pinyin: Féng Kè) is the Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Born in the Netherlands in 1961, he was educated in Switzerland and graduated from the University of Geneva with a Double Major in History and Russian. After two years in the People's Republic of China, he moved to London where he obtained his PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1990. He stayed at SOAS as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and as Wellcome Research Fellow before being promoted to a personal chair as Professor of the Modern History of China in 2002. His research and writing has been funded by over 1.5 US$ million in grants from various foundations, including, in Britain, the Wellcome Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Economic and Social Research Council and, in Hong Kong, the Research Grants Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.

He has published a dozen books that have changed the ways historians view modern China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) to China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (2022). His 2010 book Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe was selected as one of the Books of the Year in 2010 by The Economist, The Independent, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard (selected twice), The Telegraph, the New Statesman and the BBC History Magazine, and is on the longlist for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

Reviews

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page 41 my book Li Zhisui in 1949

“I was so proud of China, so full of hope, so happy that the exploitation and suffering, the aggression from foreigners would be gone forever. I had no doubt that Mao was the great leader of the revolution, the maker of a new Chinese history.”

Page 101 Robert Loh

“We began to know the fear of being isolated from our own group and of standing helplessly alone before the power of the State.”

This is a devastating history of China after the end of the civil war in 1949 between the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, and the communists under Mao Zedong who were the winners in this long struggle over China.

The conflict and the persecutions for “class struggle” began immediately. This led to entire groups of people being ostracized, imprisoned, or executed because of what they possessed or what their neighbors said. Sometimes there were public executions. Often times quotas were made for the numbers to be executed. This quota setting clearly resembled the practices of Josef Stalin.

The rural country-side was re-structured to collectivization. The local communist cadres in charge knew little about farming. They were only interested in increasing output, with no thought being put to transportation or storage of the grain output. Much of it rotted, causing famine and starvation. Lack of food was a dominant feature in the new China.

Page 100 early 1950s

Several million people were sent to labour camps or subjected to surveillance by the local militia. Countless more became outcasts. As the politics of hatred tore apart the social fabric of community life, tens of millions of people were permanently branded as “landlords”, “rich farmers”, “counter-revolutionaries” and “criminals”.

During the Korean War indoctrination tactics increased. Hatred of the United States became the norm. Chinese troops were used as cannon fodder. “Voluntary donations” of all kinds were coerced – which led to more starvation.

There was also propagandistic mind-control – or right-thinking (very Orwellian). Long and wearying indoctrination sessions were publicly held in villages across China. Individuals were cross-examined for hours at a time to encourage “self-criticism”.

Page 182-183 Lin Xiaoyu, a young woman of the communist party.

“We all felt fear. We stopped speaking even to those with whom we were normally very close. You did not dare speak with others about what was on your mind, even with those close to you, because it was very likely that they would denounce you. Everybody was denouncing others and was denounced by others. Everybody was living in fear.”

Books were burned. Suicides rose for fear of being sent to fight in Korea, or for fear of being imprisoned in a far-flung gulag.

Page 185 Hu Shi

“But few persons realise that there is no freedom of silence, either. Residents in a communist state are required to make positive statements of belief and loyalty.”

There was an interesting period in the mid-1950s where Mao invited free expression – (page 283) “let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend”. This led to a surprising outpouring of vigorous criticisms of government, of collectivization, and of Mao and his cadres. The Chinese Communist Party was listening – and after a few months, half a million victims were rounded up.

The author outlines the brutal treatment of minorities and of religion. The persecution of the Uighur people is not something new. The Chinese Communist Party has always demanded full conformity.

Page 261

Most people depended on the state for their livelihood. And all had spent countless hours in study sessions since liberation, learning how to parrot the party line, provide the correct answers and create the illusions of consent. Ordinary people may not have been great heroes, but many were great actors.

The author also brings up rebellions against government rulings. Many realized that their lives were under attack. This led to violence, and the Chinese military was used to ruthlessly oppress any outbreaks.

Page 224 mid-1950s

There were close to 20 million rural migrants, often relegated to dirty, arduous and sometimes dangerous jobs on the margins of the urban landscape… they wanted to escape the famine of the rural countryside.

Many forms of freedom were suppressed. For example, the ability to move from one region to another. Many were destined to spend their lives where they were born. Thousands were arrested with no trial and sent to far-flung work camps. Private businesses came under government control.

Page 243

The lives of millions were swallowed up by a vast array of prison camps scattered across the length and breath of the country – reform through labour.

All foreigners, excepting those from the Soviet Union, were forced to leave. China grew increasingly insular.

The author, I felt, did not stress how corrupting and ineffectual was the regime of Chiang Kai-shek. There were many good reasons why the American President Harry Truman stopped supporting the Nationalist regime.

The author does mention that the communists did much to improve the transportation network within China through better roads and trains. I also believe they did much to advance the role and status of women in the new China. And they did throw out the long dominance of the foreign powers in China. The U.K. and the U.S. had been exploiting China for decades. The Chinese, for better or worse, became in charge of their own future.

I am anxious to go on to read the next two volumes in this series of the history of the Mao years in China.

[zed · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good read by Frank Dikötter. He covers from the time of the civil war up to the Great Leap Forward. Civil wars are rarely anything but brutal, 2.5 million deaths is a figure bandied by various sources. Dikötter covers this early and not with too much length but once past he delves deeply into the early years of CP rule with initial purging of those not connected with the regime, the beginnings of the Bamboo Curtain, collectivisation measures and the attempt to reform thought. Political prisoners, made up of not just those that opposed the CP but those that failed to conform, was very interesting reading indeed. For anyone interested in this period of Chinese history this is a must read. In the end I have come out of this book, and also refer back to his brilliant, tragic and griping Mao's Great Famine, wondering if the present day Chinese consider these brutal years of Mao and reflect on the present prosperity under the CP. I look forward to Dikötter's next book on the Cultural Revolution

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank Dikotter's books are often frightening, and frequently they are depressing. His best work was on the Cultural Revolution, which entered intimately into the lives of those who lived through it. My least favorite was about the Great Leap Forward which read like a statistical list of the death toll. Could the book have been that bad if it had won the Samuel Johnson prize?

This volume covers the birth of the Peoples Republic during '45-'57 and falls somewhere between. Like other works in the trilogy it has a lot of archival detail and provides a clear image of the events. It was surprising after his "Great Famine" ('58-'62 ) was banned in China he was allowed access to the archives to research this book, and also the "Cultural Revolution" ('62-'76).

The story opens with the discovery of a mass grave in Manchuria. Changchun had been the capital of the puppet Puyi, last emperor of China. It was occupied by the Japanese, the Soviets, Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists and finally Mao’s PLA. Half a million Chinese civilians were in its precincts when the Peoples Army blockaded and bombarded the city, starving some 150,000 to death.

Following the surrender of Japan the US cut support to the Nationalists while the Soviet Union armed and aided Mao and the Communists. Beyond Changchun, Beijing and cities throughout the north fell, and Nationalists were defeated by the PLA. Mao moved quickly to capture Shanghai, Nanjing, the rest of the south and then onward to subjugate Xinjiang and Tibet, former Qing Dynasty lands.

After Mao's victory massive retribution against Nationalists, collaborators, imperialists, spies and landowners swept the country and cities. Public denunciation of class enemies was punctuated with beatings, executions, and the redistribution of land, money and personal property. Between one and two million people died. Most of this is ugly and much of it is told in graphic detail.

The book goes on to discuss the cultural destruction, state terrorism, death quotas, party purges, labor camps, thought reform and other totalitarian activities, as told by the author to be devoid of human redemption. Reading like this taps your spirit and makes you want to turn away. There is no happy ending unless you can see beyond this time period and into the future of China.

Frank Dikotter is a good writer in the sense that you can hear and feel the events he describes. There is however a kind of breathless excitement in the litany of misery. At times the account seems to descend into the chaos it portrays. This book makes you ask why? Unfortunately the question goes unanswered. It may never be answered beyond a brutal quest for power.

As Chair of Humanities at Hong Kong University it will be interesting to see if professor Dikotter retains his position given the recent tightening of academic freedom. His biography states he is on leave from the SOAS at University of London. At this point that job and city must seem a very long time ago and half a world away. It may be beckoning to him more each and every day.

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Single party rule is tyranny.

This is my first Dikotter read who has written numerous books about Mao and Chinese history. If you’re looking for an overview of the rise of Maoism and the CCP and the beginnings of Mao’s communist revolution, this is a good place to start. But be warned: this is a very difficult book to read. This largely covers 1945 to 1957 and begins mostly with war in Manchuria between the communists and the nationalists although a little of this book does cover the previous peasant revolts, the culling of landlords that lead to the rise of Mao.

You’ll get a broad overview of the swift but arbitrary class distinctions of the “poor” and “slightly less poor” after Mao finally took power which resulted in domestic divisions, social turmoil and obscene amounts of state violence. Cue the land reforms, basically just state seizure of land, which resulted in somewhere like 1.5 million dead. There was an insane amount of counter revolutionary panic violence which resulted in many innocent dead civilians including children. Mao literally instituted death and arrest quotas for any given population. Then comes the infatuation of Mao with Stalin and the pro-Soviet propaganda everywhere throughout China despite Mao basically being treated like a subordinate baltic state. Mao got a little bit of military and economic aid from the tons of concessions made to Stalin. Soon there were about 150,000 Soviet soldiers in China.

Then Korea happened and Mao insisted on helping the communist fight there along with Russia which resulted in an eventual standoff. Soon followed widespread paranoia about US biological warfare resulting in state quotas for collecting rat tails and killing bugs as there was fear they were biological vectors. You had impoverished and starving people raising rats to then kill them to then turn the tails into the state for money. This kind of insanity was everywhere. Then there was the bourgeoisie purse resulting in tons of “capitalists” dead, sanctioned or imprisoned in labor camps. Purges like that along with thought reform and re-education, Mao constructed a nice tyrannical house of cards for himself while he and his cadres lived in excess.

The state collectivism and and cooperations which ensued were an absolute disaster. State wheat monopolization resulted in starvation, protests, hoarding, waste and death. As the economy imploded with inflation, it became clear along the way that Mao knew nothing about economics. You’d think the vast labor and prison networks would provide free labor for the state but there wasn’t even infrastructure to use the raw human labor. There was wide suppression of Buddhism and Daoism with closure of temples.

The book finished off around the De Stalinization era of Khrushchev which made Mao change his tactics. In what I thought seemed too clever for Mao, he also publicly opened up about protests and dissent being able to be voiced only to then tighten the fist back again once the “counter revolutionary” traitors and intellectuals were exposed. This book does not cover The Great Leap Forward or The Cultural Revolution.

In my opinion, Mao was an abject tyrant and hypocrite. The peasant revolution he helped ushered in resulted in vast human rights violations, death, disease, starvation and nothing even close to what communism and socialism are supposed to be in theory. If I may take a liberty to express my opinion a little more here. Whether someone is espousing free market capitalism solutions or communism as a viable model to reduce poverty or to liberate the masses, the “No True Scotsman” fallacy is used far too often. Here’s what I mean: one can argue “Hey the CCP and the Soviets were just right wingers under the guise of leftist ideology, communism actually does work if it's instituted in its purist form.” And then on the other end someone can argue “Capitalism works great when it’s used in its most pure form as described by Friedman, Hayek, Sowel, Mises.” This is the No True Scotsman fallacy. What I’m trying to say is I don’t personally care about philosophy and ideology, all I care about is impact. Communism, as it has been practiced by the Soviets and Mao, has not gone well. Both communism and capitalism as pure theories can never be instituted. Successfully modern day societies are clearly combinations of strong constitutional republics, representative democracy, liberalized markets within state regulations as well as Keynesian fiscal and monetary stabilization. Are these systems perfect? Absolutely not.

The problem is single party rule regardless of espoused ideology. It is the source of the complete disaster of Maoism and every other form of authoritarian rule

[Arjen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Tragedy of Liberation was liberating in the sense that it liberated me of the last bit of respect for the start of the People’s Republic of China. The celebrated academic Frank Dikötter uses anecdotes from detailed archive research across China to show how the communist party dashed them,and broke them and every aspect of Chinese society until every peasant, worker, intellectual, believer and party member hung their hungry heads in submission and toed the inscrutable party line. This was achieved by starving, brain washing, disowning, taxing, conscripting, scapegoating, beating, and executing millions of ordinary Chinese. The book shows how life standards deteriorated after communist takeover, illustrated by the square meters available for living to the kilograms of rice consumed per person per annum.

The era of the civil war, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution have all been extensively researched and written about, but I had always had the impression that there had been a period of calm in between them. This book opened my eyes to the relentlessness of the suffering of the Chinese people since 1937 until far into the seventies, for no other purpose than egomania of a few leaders like Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and the vested interested of the party and its members. The state managed to dehumanize its citizens, and now the party openly admonishes its people in relation to food scandals that morality and ethics are lacking. The communist leadership put a few hundred million people through an exercise to prove the point that China was formidable and independent, while the goal of socialism and communism which is to provide justice and fairness to everybody’s life was completely lost from sight, or resolutely denied as irrelevant.

Dikötter is not a literary writer, but his clear style aided by a few characters that reappear in the book through the dozen years that form the scope of this book make for captivating reading. This book hit a nerve as it personalized the history, instead of a biography of the leadership, or recounting of campaigns, the book hones in on how history was undergone by the people. What was achieved? Nothing. China never attained communism, nor socialism. Its development was set backwards for decades, and individual lives ruined for generations. The excuse that the Communist Party is necessary for China to obtain continued growth is the perpetuation of a 60 year old lie.

[Justus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think a lot of my disappointment with this book is that it doesn't feel like it can stand alone. By that I mean, if you don't already know a fair amount about the Chinese Revolution, I think you are going to be poorly served by this book. It feels like this book is a reply to some other book about the Chinese Revolution. A lot of history books are myopically focused on The Great Man of History and the huge sweeping arcs of history. That helps us, an audience far removed from that point in time, understand the general movements of history, but it also means we lose sight of the the struggles, miseries, and triumphs of the common man. Dikotter's great strength is he brings all of that into focus (and he makes clear there were precious few triumphs for the common man during this period). But along the way he provides essentially none of the broader sweep. The result is that much of the book feels like there is no context.

The first way you notice this is that, until the last 2 chapters, what Mao is doing, thinking, or planning is virtually non-existent. Yet here's a 12-year sweep of history where surely we should get more than the few glances Dikotter offers? In the early parts of the book it feels like Deng Xiaopeng is mentioned more than Mao Zedong, which just feels weird. But I think that goes back to how this book is a "reply" rather than a standalone. I'll come back to this "lack of context" once again at the end of my review....

From reading other reviews, I get the impression that this book was written, in large part, to rebut the notion that the period 1945-1957 was "good" and, by extension, that Deng Xiaopeng, is blameless. I know virtually nothing about China, so I never had that impression. The result is that it feels like Dikotter is beating me over the head to give up an opinion I never held.

Dikotter is at such pains to present the evils & horrors of this period that it sometimes feels that nothing the regime did could ever be positive. I actually made a note about 80% in when he wrote "But there were real gains" because it was, I think, the first hint in the entire book that the communists did a single thing that was even slightly beneficial.

Sometimes his "anything the Communists did was wrong" stance leads him to write sentences that are, at best, worthy of an eye-roll.

Soon even the continued use of English on electricity bills in Shanghai was stridently denounced as betraying ‘a strong sense of colonial influence’.

But, I mean...weren't they right? Can you imagine if your utility bill came in, say, Spanish? And Dikotter clearly believes that language can be used for colonial & imperialist purposes because later on when the Communists do it against ethnic minorities in far-flung provinces, it is wrong. He seems to want to have it both ways. It isn't colonial influence when the British do it. But it is colonial influence when the Communists do it.

But small missteps like that can be forgiven, especially if -- as I suspect -- Dikotter's main aim is a reply to more glowing portrayals of the time period. Because Dikotter makes abundantly clear that the Communists were a terrible combination of inept, corrupt, and brutal. Dikotter gives us a tremendous view of the terror of "the common man" with his crushing number of vignettes and small statistics. But it is all undermined by, again, his lack of context.

Nearly every page is strewn with academic weasel words like "many", "most", and "some". What do any of those mean? They leave so much room for interpretation -- and given the general tone of Dikotter's book, it seems clear he wants us to always assume the worst.

When talking about the oppression of Christian missionaries in China he tries to convince us that they were "good" missionaries by integrating in the communities and learning the local language, not merely imperialists.

Missionaries were also present, as early as 1919, in all but a hundred of the 1,704 counties in China and Manchuria, many speaking the local dialect and living in close contact with the local population

What does "many speaking the local dialect" mean? Does it mean 100 missionaries in all of China? Does it 50% of them? Does it mean 10 or 20?

When talking about immigrants into China -- primarily White Russians and eastern-European Jews -- he writes, "Some acquired Chinese citizenship", trying to paint a picture of how well assimilated they are (and thus how unfair later persecution was). But was does "some" mean? That there were, like, 5 in all of China?

This happens a dozen times on every page and eventually it feels...unpleasant. Instead of interpreting the statistics for that, tell us what the statistics are.

This same lack of context shows up whenever Dikotter talks about numbers. He tells us that Christians in China were the 3rd largest religion and numbered 4 million. But, wait a second, didn't China have a population of 500 million during this time period? So they made up 0.8%? So there are more followers of Islam in American than Christians in China.

Similarly, Dikotter writes that China had imprisoned one million people, a number clearly meant to terrify us. But wait, the US currently has 2.2 million people in prison. And, again, China had a population of over 500 million at that time. So the US puts people in prison at 4x the rate of Communist China during all these purges?

In other cases he mentions something like "In May 1952 alone, over 6,000 cadres in Guangdong were demoted or persecuted". But...how big is Guangdong? How many people does it have? How many cadres did they have before this? (Today Guangdong has a population of 113 million.) Is 6,000 a lot or not? China is so big -- and our knowledge about the sizes of its various towns & provinces so small -- that our intuitive notions of scale leave us poorly equipped to put all of his numbers in context.

Dikotter demonstrates a tremendous depth of archival material. But this constant lack of context at so many levels, left me hoping that some day a better writer is able to put it all together for us.

[Joefranks69 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tragedy Porn: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 by Frank Dikötter

Ultimately, Dikötter comes across as a typical member of his generation, steeped in anti-communism and the glories of the free market from birth, and seeking to amass as much evidence as he can that the CCP is guilty of terrible crimes. (It's pretty depressing when you read him condemning the CCP for being a police state, evinced by the incredible number of people the evil commies packed their prisons with - and then realizing that even in absolute terms, there were fewer prisoners in the Chinese gulag at its height in the '50s than in the United States' er, "correctional facilities" today. And in relative terms, the Land of the Free has over twice as many people in cages than China had during these years of shame.) He succeeds at amassing the evidence; he fails, however, at making the case for condemnation. I remain in agreement with Macaulay: "We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrage, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary. The violence of these outrages will always be proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people; and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned by the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live."

Dikötter's research strategy seems to have been to scour the Chinese archives for tragedies, and lay them out in neatly ordered, bloody piles. As Sceptique500 observes in an excellent review, the book seems more like a criminal prosecution than an attempt to provide historical understanding. For those who understand the CCP as a bumbling Satan or an evil Three Stooges, this book will provide ample, even thrilling reinforcement for their views. But those who would like to hear a full trial, where the defense gets to make a case (even if it ultimately fails), will be disappointed.

Dikötter doesn't openly state it, but he's nonetheless clear where his ideological sympathies lie. (For instance, this marvel of a sentence: "People who had managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps thanks to a combination of initiative, diligence, and perseverance became outcasts.") We all have ideological sympathies, there's nothing wrong with that, but in combination with some vague argumentation it makes for a frustrating read. For instance, in "The Hurricane" we are given the admission that "[t]here is little question that absent landowners abused their power, while malpractices were rife in the countryside", but in this - uniquely in the book - we are not treated to any gory detail. Instead, the overall argument of the chapter seems to be that rural life in China pre-revolution was pretty egalitarian, and that the CCP - inept at everything save pure evil - tricked hundreds of millions of peasants into believing that there was inequality, and that those (supposedly) at the top of the (nonexistent) hierarchy needed to be brought low, so that rural life would be so thoroughly disrupted that all would become slaves to the Party. It's an audacious argument, and Dikötter doesn't actually make it: he vaguely implies it in fusillade after fusillade of anecdotes.

Most glaring in its absence is an account of economic successes during this period immediately after decades of war and during a nationalist blockade - successes which may have had something to do with public support for the CCP. Yes, China in the '50s was communist, and we all know that communism is an inefficient form of economic organization that swims against the stream of human nature, and therefore never works as well as capitalism. Except somehow communist economies were able to industrialize backward, underdeveloped parts of the world significantly faster than comparable capitalist economies, and register greater gains in basic quality of life indicators (e.g., compare China and India, Cuba and the Dominican Republic or Haiti). Dikötter tips his hat to this reality in the "Behind the Scenes" chapter, but then drowns it in a lake of anecdotes about shoddy construction. (A hotel where the faucets drip, staining the sinks? Egads!) Yet for some reason, when China opened to foreign investment in the '80s, the capital to exploit low-wage labor poured in; it could have gone anywhere in the world with low-wage labor to exploit, which is pretty much everywhere; so why China? Especially after thirty years of rule by a Party whose economic ineptitude was matched only by its sadism? Reading only Dikötter's account, it would be a mystery.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Dikotter tries to prosecute a case. He argues that the period of the so-called Chinese Liberation under the Communists was actually an brutal and unmitigated disaster. Far from a peaceful interregnum between the Civil War and the Great Famine, Dikotter posits that the horrors in this period were every bit as stark as these other catastrophes, which only exceeded it in scale, not in scope. Furthermore, just as in his book on the Famine, Dikotter tries to show that this fiasco was not the outcome of confusion, chaos, or, that perennial Communist favorite, bad weather, but of the Communist Party's ideological madness and urge to terrorize the populace. One leaves the book convinced that Dikotter is unquestionably correct, but wondering also if framing the book so clearly as an indictment detracts from the history.

Two themes seem to emerge perpetually in Dikotter's account: quotas and suicides. As with many Communists, Mao and his Politburo had an obsession with quotas; from grain procurement, to the executions of counter-revolutionaries, every Communist cadre knew to do his utmost to fulfill his quotas as they were delivered from on high. In the "Great Terror" beginning in October 1950, Mao insisted that about 1 per 1000 was the right number of executions of counter-revolutionaries nationwide, and local leaders worked like diligent accountants to measure their progress to this goal. Yet, in typical Communist fashion, the quota was seen as a floor not a ceiling, and ambitious cadres knew they needed to exceed it to demonstrate revolutionary fervor. Guizhou province asked to be allowed to kill three per thousand, Liuzhou five, and others even more. Mao was deliberately vague about how far his underlings could go, which allowed him to posture as the voice of moderation even while urging more death (for Guizhou he suggested two executions per thousand would do, any number over that number should be sent to labor camps). In a typical ambiguous fashion, Mao began to publicly question the extent of the slaughter, and finally suggested that authority to fulfill the quotas should be transferred away from local counties and given to supposedly more responsible provinces, but only after a delay. The county leaders knew this was their last chance and rushed to kill tens of thousands before the deadline. It was all the strange result of killing by numbers.

Many of those executed first had to endure days-long "struggle sessions" about their crimes, during which the local populace would be whipped into a homicidal frenzy, each individual competing to show his or her loyalty to the new Communist overlords by further excoriating these enemies of the people. Time and again those targeted would kill themselves rather than endure any more abuse, and these enforced suicides were a constant in the so-called "campaigns" of the era. The struggle sessions and suicides occurred in every walk of life. During the land reform, the fake class of "landlords" (dizhu), a concept foreign to a Chinese economy with few tenants, was invented so as to find an excuse to redistribute land and terrorize wealthier peasants. In the course of the reform, peasants were encouraged and incentivized to denounce and beat former friends and neighbors, as part of the "speak bitterness campaign," often leading to the "landlord's" suicide. (Soon this redistributed land was taken away from those same peasants and collectivized under the state.) During the "Five Antis" campaign against the bourgeois, former factory owners and shopkeepers competed with each other in popular struggle sessions to renounce their former exploitations and pledge undying fealty to the party, often to no avail. In the thought reform campaigns, intellectuals and students who disagreed with the "General Line" had to submit endless written and public confessions of their crimes, until one was finally accepted, but that rarely ended the struggle sessions and the ultimate suicides. The goal was not so much to convince those who remained alive, but to create a society of constant self-doubt and internalized fear. Survivors talked about the process of having their personality hollowed out, so only the concerns and fears of the Party could dominate their thoughts (in classic cultish fashion, loudspeakers blaring propaganda and patriotic songs appeared everywhere).

All of this madness should have been obvious both East and West, but the Mao regime found surprising friends everywhere. China's choreographed tourism (after almost all actual foreigners had been expelled as part of the "Bamboo Curtain") convinced many this was a free and prosperous society, and outsiders like India's Jawaharlal Nehru often celebrated China's economic and social achievements. Yet Mao had publicly engaged in such totalitarian quotas and "Rectification Campaigns" long before he had assumed power, and even internal Communist reports time and again showed that collective farms and shops were performing worse than their private progenitors. Even as outsiders praised China's achievements, internal studies proved that the average Chinese farmer and worker was poorer than he was before "Liberation."

Dikotter estimates that this economically devastated and internally terrorized society was purchased at the cost of over 4 million lives, with at least 2 million more being sent to brutal bamboo gulags. I wish Dikotter had done a better job comparing the Communist record with the failures of the previous Nationalist regime (minor as they were in comparison) and providing a more even-handed look at general Communist policy, but one leaves this book convinced that maybe a heartrending cri de couer is appropriate in recounting the savage history of the Party that still rules over the country.

[Julian Douglass · Rating 5 out of 5]

People read and hear about the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and see what a freak show Mao truly was. Mr. Dikotter shows that China in the early stages of becoming the People's Republic was just as gruesome. Vivid details about how people died and the horrors of communist rule really shed light on how difficult life in China was from 1945-1957. The book gives the details of what happened, however it does not give a good why, as he glosses over the civil war and never explains how corrupt or incompetent the nationalist government was. A more detailed account of that can be seen in Rana Mitter's book Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945. Other than that, very good read that sheds light on the horrors of Mao Zedong's China.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessible and heavily anecdotal history of the Chinese Civil War and the first decade of the People’s Republic, chronicling the unlikely rise of a relatively small but dedicated band of revolutionary guerillas from the Manchurian countryside to totalitarian power over a quarter of the world’s population, and the perpetual political violence employed by Mao Zedong to eliminate potential threats to his power, reduce the machinery of the state to a utensil of his oracular will, and harden the zealotries of the Party rank-and-file.

In wake of the Nationalist collapse, many Chinese cities submitted to communist rule in the hope that a unified country would finally know peace after twenty gruesome years of warfare, but the precariousness of the Party’s authority over the masses, the looming threat of invasion by Chiang Kai-shek from Taiwan, and Mao’s inferiority complex vis-à-vis Stalin prompted an unprecedented campaign of revolutionary terror. Party cadres whipped peasant villages into a homicidal fervor against a largely-fictive “landlord” class; mobs were made to denounce, humiliate, rob, assault, and sometimes kill their neighbors in public spectacles. Private business owners in the cities, who were promised toleration in 1949, were likewise summarily subjected to rituals of degradation and the state expropriation of their assets. Agricultural collectivization created widespread famine and economic disarray even before the introduction of the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Provinces were given quotas for the killing and imprisonment of “counter-revolutionaries”, real and imagined, and their leaders competed frantically with one another to stack enough bodies to satisfy Mao’s vague ideological prescriptions and to safeguard themselves from intermittent purges that culled the wavering from the Party ranks.

Every element of Chinese society was made to participate in the regime of murder and denunciation, the betrayal of families and neighbors; everyone was to be implicated in the blood guilt. The progeny of one of the world’s great civilizations took on the properties of a cult. All complexities were reduced to the nihilistic imperatives of “Liberation” and the destruction of all inherited ways of being.

I wish I could say that I don’t understand how it happened.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an engaging but gruesome look at the mass killings, starvation, and torture visited on the Chinese population as the communists took power between 1945-1957. I have heard a lot about Stalin's genocidal regime but not as much about what happened in China. It was both shocking and familiar. I've read the individual stories, I guess I never thought about what it all meant wide-scale.
This book is particularly powerful because it spans both time and geography. While Mao's growing power certainly changed the experience of the Chinese communists over time, it was also a very different experience for those in urban and rural areas. Dikötter in particular highlights the difficulties of translating communist interpretations of power and authority to rural farmers because they had no landlords in the traditional sense. There was no villain to point them at so they turned on one another.
If you do pick this one up, I recommend the audiobook. It kept me hooked. I definitely intend to listen to the others in this trilogy.

[Pres · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quotas after quotas, purge after purge, these are the collective stories present in the tragedy of liberation. Initially I was shocked. Then I felt sad. In the end I went numb.

[Yair Zumaeta Acero · Rating 4 out of 5]

En el año 2010 el historiador holandés, profesor de la universidad de Hong Kong y especialista en la historia moderna de China, Frank Dikötter publicaba su aclamado libro La gran hambruna en la China de Mao 1958-1962, un desgarrador libro sobre una de las más terribles catástrofes creadas por el hombre a lo largo de su historia, publicación que fue alabada por la crítica y se granjeó el prestigioso premio británico “Samuel Johnson Prize”. Gracias al acceso a datos desclasificados del Partido Comunista de China tanto en la zona continental como en la extinta Unión Soviética, Dikötter se lanzó a crear una trilogía donde pudiese documentar el terrible impacto negativo que tuvo la llegada el comunismo a China en la vida de la gente común y ordinaria, desde los campesinos y granjeros de las zonas más alejadas y rurales hasta los comerciantes y empresarios de las áreas costeras, empezando por la guerra civil hasta la Revolución Cultural y la muerte de Mao. Es así como llegamos al primer tomo de su trilogía (en orden cronológico mas no de publicación), titulado “La Tragedia de la Liberación: Una Historia de la revolución China (1945-1957), un desgarrador relato histórico que se remonta a la retirada de las tropas japonesas de territorio Chino luego de terminada la Segunda Guerra Mundial, seguida por la reanudación de la brutal guerra civil que enfrentó a comunistas y nacionalistas y al sangriento proceso de conquista (o “liberación” en el clásico lenguaje eufemístico de Mao) de los territorios dominados por Chiang Kai-shek y sus tropas del Kuomintang, hasta su expulsión definitiva a Taiwán en 1949. En estas páginas plagadas de violencia, sangre y atrocidades contra el pueblo asistiremos al afianzamiento del régimen comunista en China; a la expulsión, tortura y asesinato de terratenientes, campesinos a cargo de trabajadores y propietarios de herramientas y animales de labranza a través del llamado “huracán” y que no fue más que una propaganda despiadada plagada de odio, mentira y violencia para desatar la lucha de clases; las purgas al interior del Partido Comunista y el “Gran Terror” que se desanudó a lo largo del país para descubrir y destruir a los cuadros “antirevolucionarios”; las “cuotas” de muertos exigidos por el gobierno central a los cuadros provinciales; la matanza sin sentido que supuso el ingreso de China en la Guerra de Corea; el primer intento de colectivización de la tierra y de monopolio estatal sobre los alimentos llamado “Marea Ata Socialista” y que trajo las primeras hambrunas derivadas del nuevo sistema productivo; los primeros gulags, centros de reforma del pensamiento y campos de trabajo forzado (llamados en China “laogai”); la “Reforma de las Cien Flores” que desembocó en una marea de protestas en contra del régimen y que supuso la brutal represión por parte del Partido. 22 años que permiten ver la manera como se fue forjando el poder comunista a través del terror, la represión y empleo sistemático de la violencia, además de vislumbrar a un Mao Zedong que lejos de su cuidada imagen pública de sabio, pródigo y afable benefactor, se presenta como un dirigente ególatra, rencoroso, calculador e insensible.

Con valiosos datos recabados por el autor aportados directamente de archivos desclasificados del PCCh y de la Unión Soviética, el relato de Dikötter se complementa además con múltiples informes secretos, discursos originales sin censura, conversaciones de cuadros provinciales, actas de reuniones de comités comunistas; informes de cuotas de antirevolucionarios ejecutados; así como cartas de los campesinos que hicieron parte de la resistencia, que le dan el rostro humano a las cifras de muertos, toneladas de alimentos requisados e hileras de campesinos harapientos y moribundos que deambulaban por los campos y ciudades chinas. Aunque al autor a veces se le va la pluma con las estadísticas y los números, no deja de ser un relato doloroso y muy bien estructurado sobre los padecimientos de un pueblo que sufrió de manera inefable en el siglo XX y que muchas veces se relega al ostracismo por recordar otros horrores más cercanos a la cultura occidental.

Para 1957, momento en el que termina el relato histórico de esta primera parte, el socialismo de la primera etapa de la revolución china ya carga encima con aproximadamente cinco millones de muertos. Y, como se vería poco después, “El Gran Salto Adelante” y la Gran Hambruna demostrarían que el futuro sería aún peor.

[Omar Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very compelling account of the "liberation" of China by the CCP and its aftermath. It is well researched and quotes heavily from the CCPs archives to describe the vast campaign of mass murder that followed the communist victory in China. How the party organized the killing of "rich peasants" (usually anyone in the village slightly more prosperous than the rest, sometimes not even that) to establish its control and impose its (frequently imaginary) social categories on the Chinese population. There are chapters on the process that unfoleded in the cities, against foreigners, against religious institutions, against pests and even against pet dogs. And there is some detail about Mao's various internal purges and thought-control campaigns. What is NOT there is any real attempt at explaining the larger context. In the early chapters Dikotter does touch on the various (contingent and by no means inevitable) factors that led to the communist victory in the civil war (with brief mention of the role played by well-meaning American representatives, including George Marshall himself) but thereafter there is relatively little discussion of how the revolution consolidated and took control on a national scale. There is a wealth of detail about the atrocities and oppressions, but not enough about the overall picture. Still, well worth reading.
PS: Those brought up in the third world Left may not get into the book that easily because it makes few allowances for their preconceptions. A different book (perhaps by someone like Ian Buruma) may be needed to gently change their minds about the great helmsman.

[Jonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank Dikotter's history of the "liberation" of the Chinese people pulls no punches. Wearing its belief that Mao's communism was an unparalleled disaster for the country firmly on its sleeve, the book details the Chinese communist party's seizure of power (in a brief but effective overview of the cruelties of the civil war and the confusion reigning on the CCP's victorious entry into China's major cities.
The book really takes off in the period of consolidation of power, as the Chinese are taught to think properly, learn their place in this new country and seize the land from the evil landlords. Most of whom are not even really landlords, just in the wrong place, or who haven't learned which way the wind blows. The subsequent attempts to obtain parity in the Communist world with Stalin, the fall of the bamboo curtain and the growth in the number of political prisoners are are laid out and by the end of the book you're left with no doubt that the average man on the street had been broken and remoulded in Mao's flawed image. Exactly how flawed is a matter for the next book in the trilogy...

Interesting for showing how China became so closed off, and for giving examples of the birth of the doublespeak that's (arguably) led to our lives becoming a lot more "interesting" of late. Plus ca change...

[Alexandru · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We know, of course, that there is no freedom of speech, Hu Shi responded from New York. "But few persons realise that there is no freedom of silence, either. Residents of a communist state are required to make positive statements of belief and loyalty"

The Tragedy of Liberation is one of the most harrowing books I have ever read. The barbarity, cruelty and carnage of the Chinese Revolution exceeds by far all of the other communist takeovers in Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. Frank Dikotter is a professor at the University of Hong Kong and has written several books about the history of Communist China. I am honestly surprised that he has managed to maintain his teaching post and has not been silenced by the increasingly authoritarian regime.

The book is split into several parts: the first part covers the civil war period between the end of world war 2 in 1945 and the ultimate Communist victory in 1949, the second part deals with the take over of power, the third part with the institution of the terror state and the last part with the popular backlash against the regime.

The author uses primary sources in Chinese including documents and also eye witness testimony from the time of the Revolution. The most interesting testimonies are of the true Communist believers that describe how they were so hopeful at the beginning but then grew more and more disillusioned with the regime.

The military victory of the Communists was followed by a gradual taking control of the country. Dikotter excellently explains how Mao planned the takeover slowly in order to not panic the people and also to keep an international appearance of liberation. Bit by bit the screws tightened and the true face of the regime came to be known. By that time it was already too late for many people.

The calculated mass murder of the Mao regime can be read cynically from the historical archives where killing quotas were given to various provinces:

for having killed 12,000 counter-revolutionaries, as the province steeled itself for liquidating another batch of 20,000 in the spring, bringing the total to about 32,000. 'In a province of 30 million that is a good number.' But figures were merely a guide, he warned,as more might have to be killed. Mao emphasised that the terror should be' stable' (wen), 'precise' (zhun) and 'ruthless' (hen): the campaign should be carried out with surgical precision, without any slippage into random slaughter, which would undermine the standing of the party. 'But before anything else, the term "ruthless" has to be emphasised.' Perusing the reports he was handed by Luo Ruiqing, he nudged the country further: 'In provinces where few have been killed a large batch should be killed; the killings can absolutely not be allowed to stop top early.

Dikotter aptly describes the breakdown of society as the police state is introduced where people are encouraged to report on each other and the traditional Chinese system of trust and family is crushed.

a breakdown in normal human relationships was noticeable. As Robert Loh observed: During the persecution, friend had been made to betray friend; family members had been forced to denounce each other. The traditional warm hospitality of the Chinese, therefore, disappeared. We learned that the more friends we had, the more insecure our position.

The paranoia and repression of the regime was so extreme that even children could be considered counter-revolutionaries and could suffer horrible consequences from this:

In Yanxing county, over 100 middle school students were arrested and tortured in April 1951 after an anonymous  denunciation reached the local party headquarters. Wu Liening, ten years old was hung from a beam and beaten. Ma Silie, aged eight, was tied up on a cross in a kneeling position. A wooden pole was placed across his thighs and pressed down by two of his tormentors, crushing his legs and knees on the concrete floor. Even Liu Wendi, aged six, was accused of being the head of as pying squad. Two of the children were tortured to death. This was not an isolated example. A team of militia in Sichuan also tried to uncover counter-revolutionaries among schoolchildren.

People could fall foul of the regime for the most simple of things:

One young woman aged seventeen was packed off to the gulag for displaying 'blind faith in foreign imperialist things': she had praised shoe polish made in the United States.

The saying that revolutions eat their own children was never truer then in the case of the Chinese revolution. Mao regularly organised purges of his underlings, starting even during the civil war and world war 2 before taking over power. Time and time again committed Communists were purged, demoted, sent to the wastes and even executed for real or imagined ideological crimes.

"This she demonstrated by ordering a landowner to be placed in a vat of freezing water overnight. She felt cruel happiness on hearing the man scream in pain...'Seeing them die this way, I felt as proud and happy as the people who had directly suffered under them'. She was barely twenty.
Lin Zhao, like so many others, later became a victim of the regime. Arrested as a counter-revolutionary in 1960, she was secretly executed eight years later after writing hundreds of pages critical of Mao Zedong in prison, some of them inher own blood.

The economic and social impact of the Communist takeover were devastating to the Chinese economy. The Communists took over factories, industries and all agricultural land but it did not have the expertise or the capacity to actually manage it. As such, factory output collapsed and so did the agricultural output. Peasants stopped caring about their land, their animals or their tools because they knew the state would come take it all away.

The effects of collectivisation on the economy were devastating. The total cropping area for food was reduced by 3 to 4 million hectares. Grain output failed to keep up with population growth.

The Tragedy of Liberation is a must read for anyone interested in modern Chinese history. It is an eye opening recount of the tragedy suffered by the Chinese people after the horrible years of World War II. The book is part of a trilogy that focuses on the post World War II Chinese Communist history. I will surely read the other books about the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. But I am wary of the horrors that will be told in those books as well!

[Cav · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would not be accurate to say I enjoyed this book, as I'm not sure anyone could enjoy subject matter this brutal and harsh... I did find this book very informative, as well as historically interesting and important, though.

Author Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian who specializes in modern China. Dikötter has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006, according to his Wikipedia page.

Frank Dikötter :


The Tragedy of Liberation is the second volume of Dikötter's The People’s Trilogy, after his 2010 book Mao's Great Famine, which looks at the man-made catastrophe that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962. Dikötter's third and final volume The Cultural Revolution details the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

The book opens with an excellent prelude, followed by a chronological summary of the events that are to be covered. I always appreciate super-effective communication like this.
Author Frank Dikötter writes with an easy and engaging style that holds the reader's attention effectively, making this one very readable. A welcome change from many of the history books I've read.
Dikötter makes a note on the source material here:

"...The bulk of the evidence presented in this book comes from party archives in China. Over the past few years vast amounts of material have become available, and I draw on hundreds of previously classified documents, including secret police reports, unexpurgated versions of important leadership speeches, confessions extracted during thought-reform campaigns, inquiries into rebellions in the countryside, detailed statistics on the victims of the Great Terror, surveys of working conditions in factories and workshops, letters of complaint written by ordinary people, and much more.
Other sources include personal memoirs, letters and diaries, as well as eyewitness accounts from people who lived through the revolution. Sympathisers of the regime have unjustly discarded many of the claims of these earlier eyewitnesses, but these can now be corroborated by archival evidence, giving them a new lease of life.
Taken as a whole, these sources offer us an unprecedented opportunity to probe beyond the shiny surface of propaganda and retrieve the stories of the ordinary men and women who were both the main protagonists and the main victims of the revolution..."

The stories told here, as well as in Mao's Great Famine are more horrible than can be imagined. The levels of wholesale human misery, death and destruction told in these pages read worse than the most dystopian novel...
The bigger picture told here of how China fell to Communism will be one of the most horrifying tales the reader will ever encounter.
As such, works like this book series should be on the shelf of every armchair historian.

The Tragedy of Liberation is full of quotes that detail the horror that unfolded before, during, and after the Chinese Communist Revolution:

"...By the end of June, some 30,000 people were caught in the area between the communists, who would not allow them to pass, and the nationalists, who refused to let them back into the city. Hundreds died every day.
Two months later, more than 150,000 civilians were pressed inside the death zone, reduced to eating grass and leaves, doomed to slow starvation. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere, their bellies bloated in the scorching sun. ‘The pungent stench of decomposition was everywhere,’ remembered one survivor..."
"...Soon the nationalist soldiers turned on the civilians, stealing their food at gunpoint. They slaughtered all the army horses, then dogs, cats and birds. Ordinary people ate rotten sorghum and corncobs before stripping the bark from trees. Others ate insects or leather belts. A few turned to human flesh, sold at $1.20 a pound on the black market.8
Cases of collective suicide occurred all the time. Entire families killed themselves to escape from the misery. Dozens died by the roadside every day.
‘We were just lying in bed starving to death,’ said Zhang Yinghua when interviewed about the famine that claimed the lives of her brother, her sister and most of her neighbours. ‘We couldn’t even crawl..."

Mao Zedong had instilled a system of killing quotas, in an effort to purge his vision of a modern Communist China of "capitalist", "nationalist", and "landlord" influences:

"...Like steel production or grain output, death came with a quota mandated from above. Luo Ruiqing could not possibly oversee the arrest, trial and disposal of the many millions who became the targets of terror, so instead Mao handed down a killing quota as a rough guide for action. The norm, he felt, was one per thousand, a ratio he was willing to adjust to the particular circumstances of each region.
His subordinates kept track of local killing rates like bean counters, occasionally negotiating for a higher quota. In May 1951 Guangxi province, for instance, was told to kill more, even though a rate of 1.63 per thousand had already been achieved. Guizhou province, destabilised by popular uprisings, requested permission to kill three per thousand, and the Liuzhou region five per thousand. ‘The provincial party committee of Guizhou requests a target of three per thousand, that too is too much, I feel. This is how I look at it: we can go over one per thousand, but not by too much.’
Once a death rate of two per thousand had been achieved, the Chairman opined, people should be sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to work in labour camps..."

Although the book doesn't specifically mention these by name, the Chinese Communist Revolution is a historic examplar of pathological groupthink leading to ideological purity spirals. That is; the pro-social wiring all humanity innately possesses can (and often does) lead a society to absolutely disastrous consequences, if left unchecked.
The writing here makes an excellent case study in social psychology and the pathology of mob mentality.
The Maoist " struggle sessions " that swept through Chinese society during this period are absolutely terrifying...

The Tragedy of Liberation should be required reading for the young, impressionable minds (often in academia) who live comfortably in Western Civilization, while paradoxically advocating for socialism/communism.
Indeed, this is one of the most brutal and hardcore books the average reader will ever come across. Words alone cannot convey the mass dysfunctionality and horror of everyday life in Maoist China written about in these pages...

This was an exceptionally well researched, written, and delivered book. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested. I look forward to starting Volume 3 of this series shortly.
5 stars, and a spot of my "favorites" shelf

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spanning the years 1945 to 1957, this book provides the history of the Chinese Civil War and the Great Terror that followed.

This part of history is very important for Americans to understand, especially for those who have been swayed into believing that socialism would create a happier and more just society. The actual story of Mao’s Chinese Revolution and the transition to collectivism convincingly demonstrates the enormous human cost of forcing Marxist principles onto a society. Unfortunately, these tragic results were so widespread that the task of simply reporting them becomes so lengthy and depressing that few readers will have the fortitude to press ahead until the end. And this history doesn’t even include the subsequent Great Leap Forward which caused the Great Famine, or the devastation of the Cultural Revolution of 1962-76, which are covered in separate volumes.

Once again, the people that would most benefit from the education this book provides will be least likely to read it. Perhaps what is needed instead is a pithy tweet linking to a short summary article? Another depressing thought.

The next best thing would be links to a couple of very well done and helpful reviews:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

While one always suspected that all those glossy Chinese magazines of the 1950s that depicted endless fields of wheat and happy youths waving oversize red flags wasn't depicting the full story of the early years of Communist rule in China, the years up to the Great Leap Forward were clouded in a calculated cover-up. No more. Author Dikotter has poured over volumes of public and private 'official' records as well as newspaper reports, private memoirs, incorporating many personal interviews and published personal memoirs of its survivors (for example, Jean Pasqualini's Prisoner of Mao). The result is a shocking read; the title says it all in its use of the word 'tragedy'.

In short, "the history of communism in China is...a history of promises made and promises broken" although I would add the qualifier of 'early communism' to this statement as we have not yet heard (to use a popular opera phrase to signify an approaching final act) "the fat lady sing."

"The communists wanted to woo before they tried to control. Like Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Mao achieved power by promising every disaffected group what they wanted most: land for the farmers, independence for all minorities, freedom for intellectuals...." After the early years of wooing, however, came the years of tyranny and "as this book shows, the first decade of Maoism was one of the worst tyrannies in the history of the twentieth century, sending to an early grave at least 5 million civilians and bringing misery to countless more." Dikotter records endless tales of torture, deprivation, random murders based on population percentages Mao personally decided, starvation, suicides. No child was too young to be tortured and publicly executed if branded a 'rightist' and no village elder too respected to be stripped naked, beaten, and even buried alive (as was threatened even Premier Xi Jinping's revolutionary father at one point). The goal being of course to terrorise every citizen into total obedience was achieved and the road clear for Mao's megalomania to run free. When a young writer by the name of Wang Shiwei wrote an essay denouncing "the arrogance of the big shots who were 'indulging in extremely unnecessary and unjustified perks 'while the sick could not even have a sip of noodle soup'" he was killed, "reportedly chopped to pieces and thrown into a well." Religious leaders, academics, industrialists, monks and nuns, poets and artists were similarly dealt with where needed.

Dikotter is currently Chair Professor of Humanities at the U. of Hong Kong (formerly Professor of Modern History of China at SOAS), and a much published author of books on modern China. His classic on the Great Famine in the late 50s/early 60s (Mao's Great Famine: The History Of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62) was a BBC Non-fiction prizewinner in 2011.

How can one apply the star designations used by Goodreads of 'like' and 'really like' to such a book? It is an excellent coverage of these early years, but its subject matter and the violence that continues page-after-page makes it impossible to "really like" such a work. "Highly recommended" would be a better label, for this excellent ground-breaking book is highly recommended to all interested in Chinese history and/or communism and/or mankind's less noble doings.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a non-fiction book about the first decade after WW2 in China, especially after the creation of the PRC. There are a lot of awful details and some readers can think that the author is biased, but I disagree because I know from a family history as well as a general knowledge that similar stuff happened in the Soviet Union, only less squeezed up – here there was a land distribution, almost a decade of NEP and then collectivization, famine, repressions – the two decades were condensed into less than one in PRC.

The book is very hard on an emotional level; you either look at death tolls as abstract numbers or you have to stop to calm down. Say, here is a (abridged) story from the beginning:
Changchun, in the middle of the vast Manchurian plain north of the Great Wall of China, was blockaded for five months in 1948. Lin Biao, the commander in charge of the communist troops, ordered that it be turned into a ‘city of death’. He placed sentries every 50 metres along a perimeter around the city and prohibited starving civilians from leaving, putting more pressure on the grain reserves of the nationalists. People tried to survive by eating grass, insects and tree bark. A few turned to human flesh. … At least 160,000 people died of hunger and disease during the siege… Inside Changchun were some 500,000 civilians, many of them refugees who had fled the communist advance and were trapped in their journey south to Beijing after the railway lines had been cut. A hundred thousand nationalist troops were also garrisoned inside the city… Few [refugees] ever made it past the communist lines. Lin Biao had placed a sentry every 50 metres along barbed wire and trenches 4 metres deep. Every exit was blocked. He reported to Mao: ‘We don’t allow the refugees to leave and exhort them to turn back. This method was very effective in the beginning, but later the famine got worse, and starving civilians would leave the city in droves at all times of day and night, and after we turned them down they started gathering in the area between our troops and the enemy.’ Lin described how desperate the refugees were to be allowed through communist lines, explaining that they:
knelt in front of our troops in large groups and begged us to let them through. Some left their babies and small children with us and absconded, others hanged themselves in front of sentry posts. The soldiers who saw this misery lost their resolve, some even falling on their knees to weep with the starving people, saying, ‘We are only following orders.’ Others covertly allowed some of them through. After we corrected this, another tendency was discovered, namely the beating, tying up and shooting of refugees by soldiers, some to death (we do not as yet have any numbers for those injured or beaten to death).

The communists were cruel and they are the main focus of the book, but the author doesn’t spare nationalists, noting e.g. that Among the refugees were several thousand soldiers, many crippled and disabled. The regime in Taiwan viewed them as a security risk and refused them entry. After months of surviving in a shanty town clinging to Mount Davis, they were settled at Rennie’s Mill by the Social Welfare Office, living in large tents and tin sheds

On an abstract side, I wandered on the difference between the communist rule in China and republics of the USSR: firstly, one can assume that China (as supported by its historical narrative) has a long period of statehood and hierarchical structures. At the same time, it was China, where Violence was an indispensable feature of land distribution, implicating a majority in the murder of a carefully designated minority. Work teams were given quotas of people who had to be denounced, humiliated, beaten, dispossessed and then killed by the villagers, who were assembled in their hundreds in an atmosphere charged with hatred. In a pact sealed in blood between the party and the poor, close to 2 million so-called ‘landlords’, often hardly any better off than their neighbours, were liquidated. From Hebei, Liu Shaoqi, the second-in-command, reported that some of them had been buried alive, tied up and dismembered, shot or throttled to death. Some children were slaughtered as ‘little landlords’. This lowest level ‘blood pact’ sounds quite anarchic. Secondly, there are many more tortures for torture's sake and suicides. Say, in the 1930s NKVD broke 90% of people to sign up ‘voluntary confessions’ in mere weeks, but it is China where Quentin Huang, a bishop who refused to relinquish his faith, was locked up in a wooden cage with eighteen other convicts. It had bars about 10 centimetres in diameter each and about 5 centimetres apart. The door was locked and chained. The cage was about 2 by 2.5 metres in dimension, situated at the dark, damp end of a long room. The other end of the room was used as quarters for the guards who watched the prisoners. ‘Neglect and delay, particularly with diarrhoea cases, soon turned a part of the wooden cage into a natural latrine, filthy and foul smelling with lice, fleas, and hungry rats, both big and small, running hither and thither even in the daytime, from the farther corners of the muddy walls just next to the wooden cage.’

It was also interesting to find out the relations between the USSR and PRC: I knew a bit, but not the facts like that Stalin (who was behind the collectivization which caused the Great Famine of 1932-33) stressed to Mao the need to limit the struggle to landlords only and leave the economy of the rich peasants intact in order to speed up China’s recovery after years of warfare. His views were wired to Beijing in February 1950. Or the under-carpet struggle for Manchuria, whose communist leader Gao Gang, during the meeting with Stalin in Moscow in the summer of 1949, floated the idea that Manchuria be declared the seventeenth republic of the Soviet Union to protect it from the United States.

This is an emotionally wrecking but very strong overview of the period in PRC.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark period in China’s history. While there was indeed a partial liberation from foreign influence, it came at the cost of a massive loss of individual freedoms, personal security, community cohesion, and cultural life, all in the name of a revolution largely inspired by the Soviet model.

The close ties between China and the Soviet Union are one of the most striking elements to emerge from this book. Dikötter recounts, describes, and analyzes in chronological order the evolution of China between 1945 and 1957, a period marked by extreme and systematic violence. The communist revolution, which gradually imposed itself, profoundly disrupted everyday life by enforcing dogmas drawn from the Russian experience that were largely ill-suited to the Chinese context—particularly with regard to private property, social structures, and, above all, the disastrous collectivization of agriculture.

As a result, the Chinese people found themselves imprisoned within their own country, under the rule of a dictator who controlled every aspect of social and political life and who gave free rein to a constant paranoia directed against his own citizens. The so-called period of “liberation” thus appears to be a profound euphemism: by following the model of the Russian Revolution, violence and the coercion of a vengeful police state contributed to the destruction of a millennia-old social and cultural fabric.

[Paul Kenyon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great introduction to the early years of the Chinese Revolution. Grippingly written. Minimum of fussy analysis and needless hair-splitting. Confident and colourful prose that is, perhaps, unexpected from such a celebrated academic. It's a real lesson in how to transform tonnes of original research into powerful and detailed personal stories. The numbers of dead are, of course, unimaginable, and Dikotter does well to avoid any examination in that direction, instead concentrating on the lives of the perpetrators and the testimonies of a handful of Everyman victims.

[Catriona · Rating 3 out of 5]

A time in history I knew nothing about and am very glad to learn about. This book is less than 300 pages but took me some time to get through because it is very densely packed with details, lots of statistics and data. I would have appreciated more broad strokes being interspersed with the details, I feel that way greater understanding would have been conveyed.

[Benjamin Uke · Rating 5 out of 5]

An account of the communist revolution in China, how a one-party states take control of the past as they take control of society and its history. A great intellectual and archival challenge of our century is to historicize the People's Republic even as it continues to exist.

With the author taking sources from verified sources, including recently unearthed in party archives. Dikötter wades deep into the grim reality and marshals his meticulous research skills to show how Mao continually set up expectations only to mow them viciously down. Under the "shiny surface" of Mao's propaganda, the author ably reveals the violence and misery in a tightly-written narrative of the twelve most pivotal, violent, and horrific years in modern Chinese history.

The chapter on thought reform is especially brutal and hard to read. Physical pain through torture is one thing but how do you explain what goes on in a person's mind when being brainwashed and indoctrinated through "study sessions" day in and day out?

"You must hate even if you feel no hatred. You must kill even if you do not wish to kill."

It also highlights how Mao is a master at dividing and conquering. His program of denunciation and land reform is something that just has to be read. He conquered the people's mind and feasted on their fear and mistrust of others.

"My head is made of steel, bones and cement. It is beyond reform." - Liu Guoliao

He uses many different sources to compile as accurate an picture as can be of what exactly happened during these beginning troubled years of China's transformation from imperialism into one of communism. It becomes uncomfortable, through not fault of the author, but of the famine and tragedy happening to innocent citizens in the cities and in the countryside.

"Suicide was not easily accomplished...But nothing bred ingenuity quite like despair".

Being a professor in a Hong Kong University, he actually knows how to teach and by that you won't have to worry about this book being difficult to read or follow, not succumbing to statistics or technical jargon. An excellent presentation of a harrowing, but necessary, topic.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traces the series of campaigns and programs executed by the Chinese Communist Party over the course of the period in question. It runs up until 1958, when Dikötter's book on the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine (published prior to this book) picks up the chronology.

The book has a lot of information in it, but it often feels piecemeal and I was overwhelmed by it. There are few characters to follow, but when some of them show up later, it is often hard to remember what they had done earlier. I am speaking here less of Mao or Liu Shaoqi than the minor offenders and intellectuals who brought up as examples over and over. The text goes back and forth between policy promulgation in the upper echelons of the party and the experiences of people on the ground (this is stated focus of this "People's History"), but there is a clear dissonance between the two. The former reads more narratively, as an assessment of Mao's character as a political chameleon attempting to consolidate his rule, while the latter sprawls chronologically as the pain of foolish policy implementation. So the structure of each chapter is: Mao find himself in a new situation - policy is changed, people suffer. I found myself wishing there was more of a narrative or even an argument to hold the book together. There isn't a conclusion or epilogue, the book simply has a closing paragraph that teases the next volume in the series.

I did enjoy reading about the General Line, the Socialist High Tide, the Rectification Campaign, and other often over-looked political winds. The discussions of Manchuria were also fascinating, as it the region turns from a Japanese colony to Soviet sphere of influence to the "Great Northern Wilderness." Also the book was highly readable.

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brutal book, sometimes to the point of being repetitive, about the Chinese liberation--the triumph of Mao over the Chiang Kai-shek and the first year's of the People's Republic of China including the consolidation of the Communist party's control, land reform, thought reform, and briefly at the end the "hundred flowers bloom" period setting up the Great Leap Forward that is covered in the next volume of the trilogy. The book focuses on the consequences of all of this for the people of China--the ways in which the communists set quotas for killing (which were more often floors than ceilings), their network of concentration camps, how collectivization became serfdom, etc. He argues that while China appeared to progress enormously through 1956 the people themselves were materially much worse off in terms of food, healthcare, living accommodations, etc. Frank Dikötter traces all of this directly to Mao's desire to be more Stalinist than Stalin, documenting the ways in which Mao became worse after Stalin's restraint was gone after 1953.

The Tragedy of Liberation depicts nothing at all redeeming about the communist control of China, all of the violence is directly attributed to the ignorance and vainglory of Mao, with little role for broader political or social developments--beyond a describioption of Mao's love/hate relationship with Stalin and the impact that events in the Eastern Bloc had on China--including Kruschev's secret speech and Hungary's revolt.

This is the first in a trilogy--the next volume covers the Great Leap Forward and associated famine. The last volume covers The Cultural Revolution. I will certainly be reading them.

[Stijn De Smet]

The Tragedy of Liberation by Frwnk Dikötter is a thoroughly depressing, yet informative introduction to Mao's rule in the People's Republic of China.

The book details the fall of the Nationalists in China and ends just before the Great Leap Forward is introduced. Frank Dikötter fills these pages with unending examples of misery, incompetence and sheer disregard of human life. These are supported by archive evidence with personal stories of the survivors mixed in. It is honestly difficult sometimes to keep reading all the depressing statistics of suicide, torture, malnoirishment and death that was inflicted on the people. Although a more lighthearted book would have been an injustice to the people that had to live through these times.

I would still recommend The Tragedy of Liberation to anyone that is curious about Chinese history. It's a piece of history that is often unkown or unloved in the Western world and romanticised in other parts of the world. Even though it can be a difficult read, it is compelling to try and understand how China was transformed by Mao and what his legacy still means to his day.

[Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very readable history of revolutionary China, The Tragedy of Liberation is a comprehensive look at the events and profound effects of that era in Chinese history, referred to as the Liberation. The author has done solid research using a variety of sources, accounts and statistics to support his assertions. I liked that he used Chinese sources to document this history, not just foreign accounts of it. His writing style was very accessible, for even though this was potentially a very challenging topic, I still found it very easy to read and his presentation style was very approachable. Additionally as a Kindle edition, I really enjoyed this ebook's format. The X-ray feature of the book was fantastic, because as a person was mentioned in the book, the reader can immediately look that person up through X-ray to learn more about them. Overall, I was very excited to purchase and read this book as I feel it will definitely help anyone who is serious about wanting to understand the evolution of contemporary day China.

[Damen Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

中國近代史是個滲過血液的死結，當中滿載血腥與陰謀，泯滅人性與良知；政治運動事件一個接著一個，教人不知從何了解。

楊繼繩的專業是個記者。他的磚頭書鉅細無遺，細緻到地方發生的事件都一一記載；如此相反，馮客的三部曲便親民得多。它將國共內戰、大饑荒、文化大革命等極重大的歷史事件精煉，用簡潔清晰的筆觸將事實娓娓道來，過程中自然免不了揚起一堆血污：殺人、打人、虐人⋯⋯是的，中國的近代史就是這般恐怖的一部血書。

讀史，無非是為了知古鍳今。了解到某個政權的所作所為，就自然不會對它作無謂的幻想，更無所謂理想幻滅的可能：從思想稍為成熟的那一天起，我便從不對它懷有任何希望。

馮客的近代三部曲，���無數遭歷史遺忘的亡靈來說，是一場超渡；對無信史可讀的國人來說，不能不說是一場公德，肯定是了不起的成就。直到今天，「血結」還未曾解決，也肯定沒有解決的一天。血的歷史，真的可以令人汲取教訓？我自負的認為，能領悟個中三昧的，恐怕只有少數的智者。