Frank Dikötter

I long refrained from picking up this book, not certain whether I could stomach the tales of horror and suffering. More than 45 million Chinese people died between 1958 and 1962, solely due to the mad superpower dreams of an uncaring dictator. This is a good account of one of the 20th century's largest human-induced catastrophes (ranking eleventh in Steven Pinker's historical atrocities rating).

The truly grizzly narrative thankfully only starts in part four. The first three parts of the book show more offer an introduction to how and why Mao pushed his country into this hasty and wasteful change. China had long been a Soviet client which supplied it with capital and technology. Mao wanted to break out of the Soviet embrace while continuing to develop China towards superpower status. As a measure to regain independence, China started to pay for Soviet technology with food. As China did not have a surplus of food, these exports deliberately triggered famine for millions of Chinese. A second source of hunger was the shift from agriculture to heavy industry. Lacking (foreign) experts, China started to build up an inefficient heavy industry that destroyed the environment and interrupted the Chinese food supply. The Chinese peasants, living in collective communes, were under the total control of the party bullies who controlled access to food. The level of violence willingly even eagerly inflicted on neighbors is a shocking testament to homo homini lupus, Chinese-style.

The perverse benchmarking of the party apparatchiks, fudging the numbers and hiding the truth, escalated and prolonged the disaster. The fault, however, rests with Mao who deliberately refused to listen and care. As Jung Chang argues, when the party finally forced him to stop, he designed the Cultural Revolution to punish them for their intervention. The suffering and death, as told in parts four to six, makes for an uncomfortable read as society's weakest suffered the most (part five: children, women, the elderly). Even the Soviets who knew about inflicting pain were shocked by the Chinese brutality and indifference to the plight of others. A truly dark chapter of human history that deserves wider acknowledgment. show less

This book documents in a lot of detail the awful consequences communist victory in the Chinese civil war had for the general population. The madness of communist economic policy and propaganda is on full display as the party requisitions fixed quotas of food and leaves the peasants to starve and implicate each other as counter-revolutionaries. The author focuses more on the plight of ordinary people than on the party leadership or how the communist polity was supposed to function. This is a show more welcome change to some other books on Chinese history which more or less ignore what communist rule meant in practice.

The flipside of the coin is that the author does not devote many pages on Mao's personality cult or the internal dynamics of the party. This book will not provide much general guidance if you're looking to compare the Chinese manifestation of totalitarian communism to the Soviet one. But it certainly reminds us that China has progressed a long way since these dark days. It's also interesting to note that North Korea's current political system is a direct carbon copy of the one Mao founded. Seventy years after the events of this book, North Korean people are still being stomped upon in the manner which this book describes. show less

This excellent book is a survey of eight twentieth-century dictators, examining how the 'cult of personality' contributed to their careers. The selection includes the four best-known examples (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao) and adds North Korea's Kim Il-Sung, Haiti's 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, Romania's Ceauçescu and Ethiopia's Mengistu. One alarming thought, which he points out in his introduction, is that Dikötter could just as easily have written the same book using entirely different show more examples illustrating consequences just as disastrous. Dikötter does a sterling job of condensing the dictators' careers into short, easily digested biographies. This is a challenge of brevity for the first four, who are regularly picked over in detail. The final four provide a fascinating and terrifying insight into less well-publicised figures whose regimes were uniformly brutal and worryingly recent. The book seems repetitive; this is not a criticism, but an observation of a presumably deliberate tactic by the author: we are shown again and again how the same ideas pursued in the same way have had the same dire consequences. Buyer be warned, the final quarter of the book consists of endnotes, which could happily have been set in smaller type. Recommended. show less

This is goddamn terrifying.

The short narrative of the Great Leap Forward is that Mao enacted a series of policies from 1958-1962 which fostered crash industrial development on the Stalinist model. This led to communal farms, sale of all agricultural products, importing heavy machinery, and increasingly farfetched schemes such as 'backyard furnaces' to increase steel output, a 'pest-hunting campaign' which led millions of citizens chasing sparrows instead of planting crops, and the show more close-planting of crops to increase production - which as any farmer knows, leads to too many crops taking nutrients from the soil and a decrease in output.

All of these agricultural and industrial schemes contributed only to a part of the catastrophe. With the lack of food, civil society began to break down. Theft, violence, heavy-handed repression by local party cadres, black markets, massed refugees to Hong Kong, cannibalism, prison camps, executions for stealing food, and so forth. It is less a famine than a democide, a forced repression of the rural population at the expense of the cities, who lived on half rations and worked in filthy half-built polluting factories, to fulfill some mad dream, supported by a propaganda apparatus which sold 'The Big Lie'.


Propaganda promised fairy tales. Instead the Chinese people received nightmares.

A disaster on this sheer scale is incomprehensible. I should be feeling horror. Instead it is incomprehension. 18 million dead at the least, 70 million at the most. Just numbers. I can't imagine it. How. show less