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People's Trilogy #1-3
Mao's Great Famine / The Tragedy of Liberation / The Cultural Revolution
Please Note That The Following Individual Books As Per Original ISBN and Cover Image In this Listing shall be Dispatched Collectively:
Peoples Trilogy 3 Books Collection Set By Frank Dikötter:
Mao's Great Famine:
Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
The Tragedy of Liberation:
In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life. In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao's court.
The Cultural Revolution:
After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
Peoples Trilogy 3 Books Collection Set By Frank Dikötter:
Mao's Great Famine:
Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
The Tragedy of Liberation:
In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life. In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao's court.
The Cultural Revolution:
After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
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About the author
Frank Dikötter
21 books532 followersFrank 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 29, 2021
One doesn't have to be a historian to recognize this trilogy as an amazing achievement. The author has combed archives across China's provinces and even gained access to primary sources from the central Party archives in Beijing, which is rare. All three volumes cover their subjects in minute detail. These are intended as a "people's history" in that they are full of personal stories and eyewitness accounts at local level along with data from official reports. Extraordinary. Compulsory reading for anyone seeking a proper understanding of Communist China.
August 5, 2022
When people think of history’s greatest mass murderers, Hitler is always the monster that comes to mind. But Stalin, and here, Mao, make Hitler look like an amateur.
Seizing control of China after a bloody civil war, Mao went on to institute a totalitarian dictatorship that few have suppressed for cruelty, terror, horrors perpetrated, and nightmarish living. An estimated 50 million people perished under Mao’s reign of blood.
As always, communism promises utopia, freedom for all, plenty to eat, no unemployment, and plentiful harvests. The reality is, as always, quite different. Right from the start, people were denouncing neighbors, friends, family members, and anyone else that had had it any better than them before the revolution. But those people were marginally in a better condition. They lived and worked and ate next to each other, but the class warfare had started. Show trials, executions, (mock and real) famine, torture, sadism, and unimaginable horrors were just beginning.
Mao, under the idea that he was some sort of divine Superman, decreed. And what he decreed, must happen. No matter the cost in material, money, time, or lives. The Great Leap Forward, in which Mao wanted to pass the UK as a steel producer, cost millions of lives as people starved to death, and tore their own homes down to feed backyard furnaces to produce only useless slag.
The cultural revolution, where people who were not sufficiently communist enough were tortured, killed, imprisoned, and hounded to death. All the while, Mao watched and plotted. Always looking for a boogeyman that was out to destroy him, he liquidated endless numbers of people. No matter the cost, Mao was always right. After setting China back 100 years, with his homicidal insanity, Mao dies in 1976. Unfortunately, he wasn’t strung up by his people, but died an old man.
The books are very instructional in detailing China during Maos reign, but it can get hard for a westerner to keep all the names straight. And during the third books lesson on the cultural revolution, your head will spin trying to figure out who’s who and what they’re being accused of. But that’s the point of communism, you’re a hero today, tomorrow your not sufficiently militant enough, and off to jail you go.
Seizing control of China after a bloody civil war, Mao went on to institute a totalitarian dictatorship that few have suppressed for cruelty, terror, horrors perpetrated, and nightmarish living. An estimated 50 million people perished under Mao’s reign of blood.
As always, communism promises utopia, freedom for all, plenty to eat, no unemployment, and plentiful harvests. The reality is, as always, quite different. Right from the start, people were denouncing neighbors, friends, family members, and anyone else that had had it any better than them before the revolution. But those people were marginally in a better condition. They lived and worked and ate next to each other, but the class warfare had started. Show trials, executions, (mock and real) famine, torture, sadism, and unimaginable horrors were just beginning.
Mao, under the idea that he was some sort of divine Superman, decreed. And what he decreed, must happen. No matter the cost in material, money, time, or lives. The Great Leap Forward, in which Mao wanted to pass the UK as a steel producer, cost millions of lives as people starved to death, and tore their own homes down to feed backyard furnaces to produce only useless slag.
The cultural revolution, where people who were not sufficiently communist enough were tortured, killed, imprisoned, and hounded to death. All the while, Mao watched and plotted. Always looking for a boogeyman that was out to destroy him, he liquidated endless numbers of people. No matter the cost, Mao was always right. After setting China back 100 years, with his homicidal insanity, Mao dies in 1976. Unfortunately, he wasn’t strung up by his people, but died an old man.
The books are very instructional in detailing China during Maos reign, but it can get hard for a westerner to keep all the names straight. And during the third books lesson on the cultural revolution, your head will spin trying to figure out who’s who and what they’re being accused of. But that’s the point of communism, you’re a hero today, tomorrow your not sufficiently militant enough, and off to jail you go.
October 7, 2024
The books are good, if not great, but the belaborment of the point of how violent the CCP was and how much terror they inflicted upon the civilian population was too much for me. The first book was a great introduction book on the topic, but the following 2 books should've covered different topics instead of just more of the same.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews