The key to this new book is that it takes the reader back into the decades before the Communist Party seized power, in 1949. That era is often depicted as a kind of heroic “Robin Hood” era of the party. It was no such thing. Dikotter shows us
how destructive and murderous a force it was and how its ascent to national power was soaked in the blood of ordinary Chinese people and facilitated by Stalin’s funding and provision of arms.The American Trotskyist Harold R. Isaacs (1910-1986) was a witness to the evolution of the Chinese communist movement in the 1930s. In 1938, he published a book called The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. He meant, at that point, Stalin’s direction of the Chinese communist movement from Moscow, leading to Chiang Kai-shek crushing the movement in 1927-33.
In a preface to a first revised edition of his book, in 1951, Isaacs wrote:
Between their defeat in China, in 1927, and their victory, in 1949, the Chinese Communists grew into a force capable only of imposing a new totalitarian dictatorship upon China. In the same interim, Russia, in that day still an adolescent tyranny, has grown into a totalitarian monster, imposing its great weight not only upon China but upon the whole world.
What Dikotter gives us, in Red Dawn Over China is the historical drama of that development playing out.
His book’s title seems to echo or rather respond to the famous Red Star Over China of Edgar Snow (1905-1972), also first published in 1938, which presented a highly influential image of Mao Zedong and his movement as social justice warriors of a philosophical and visionary nature. There were multiple subsequent editions, but when Snow died, in 1972, Mao was still alive and had caused repeated calamities in China. Snow remained an admirer of Mao’s.
Dikotter has been pushing back hard against the “Snow” job done by pro-Party sympathisers and propagandists for many decades. This begins with the fact that, in the immediate wake of winning the civil war, the communists launched a revolutionary terror campaign which took the lives of millions of people.
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He emphatically underscores the reality that the history of three decades before 1949 bears very little resemblance to the version of it propagated by the Chinese communists and their fellow-travellers since the 1930s.Three statements warrant excerpting here, as enticements to buy and read this book:
...what becomes abundantly clear in one document after another is how marginal the Communist Party was in the history of China from its foundation in 1921 to the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The Communists did not wait until victory in 1949 to expunge the record and control the narrative.
A whole range of alternative voices, including a rich tradition of democratic thought and practice that ran throughout republican China has been relegated to the shadows after 1949.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/culture/how-a-new-history-exposes-the-bloody-re...All that monstrous tyranny BEFORE they even staged their coup, starved millions to death, had their Great Leap and wreaked havoc on their people.
https://www.hoover.org/research/red-dawn-over-china-how-communism-conquered-quar...
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China: little pinks see merit in 50 million dead (Read 8020 times)
