this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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I’m reading through Frank Dikotter’s People’s Trilogy - that’ll give you an idea of what happened after the revolution. Before that, there’s a very good early biography of Mao written by an American journalist Edgar Snow called Red Star Over China.
Red Star will answer questions on why the Chinese would choose the Communists over the Nationalists.
Read Red Star first, so that you can be in the mindset of a hopeful optimist excited to see the old Fascist guard of the Nationalists be overthrown.. it makes perfect sense why the nationalists would lose. However: what came after that was an enormous human tragedy.
Imagine people starving in California - you have a cornucopia of perfect land and the country still manages to accidentally or deliberately murder 100 million of its own people through insistence on ideological purity. Dikotter explains really well how that came to be.
The next thing I want to read is probably the papers Zhao Ziyang wrote - it would be fascinating to understand why the leaders of the Communist Party decided to ignore the student movement at Tiananmen in 1989 and decided to bring in the army to restore order by killing many of the demonstrators.
Oh - there’s also a really good documentary named The Gate of Heavenly Peace. That’s a must watch.
Did they do it out of fear of a repeat of students being used to purge and kill leaders? Was it that they felt democracy still had too many problems? These are in Stanford at the moment, I’m not sure if someone’s made a book with them yet. But Zhao Ziyang wanted a democracy, so it’ll be interesting to understand why he failed at convincing the other leaders in the CCP to have one.
Dikötter's books are historically revisionist trash. To engage with them critically you need to read actual histories first, otherwise you will come away with wrong and unscholarly ideas - such as that Mao killed 100 million people.
What would you consider “actual histories”?
I can tell you, as a complete matter of fact from first hand witnesses within my own family, that the Chinese people were definitely starving during the Mao era.
Of course, they don’t understand that Mao was the reason for it, they have portraits of him on their walls and treat him like a hero. But they were definitely starving.
There are a wide range of historical works by competent people on China in the 1900s. Much of it will be in the primary literature, published in journals like China Journal, China, etc. You could read 10-30 articles from China Journal alone on this topic to get a basic handle on much of this (piecing together a good understanding will require reading many things, not just a book or two).
For an initial liberal historian's view of The Great Leap Forward, you could read Eating Bitterness by Wemheuer. This would provide a sense of how a competent liberal academic approaches this topic. Of course, liberal academics trying their best to take themselves seriously are still biased animals like everyone, so what someone like Wemheuer will fail to do is contextualize against the underlying century of capitalist deprivation that made China's economy brittle and primed it for agricultural fragility. As a simple liberal historian, Wemheuer will not understand or care much about economy or ecology. So to offset such oversights, I recommend reading critical works alongside liberal books like these. Some may appear in journals like China Journal. I might recommend reading something like Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts to get a more coherent view of what happened in China, to China, and what masses of the global south have struggled against for centuries, with nearly every famine being in some way man-made and of a greater scale than one would understand reading only hacks like parent recommended.
Re: first hand accounts, well yes of course we all know there was famine. Though I would caution against extrapolating from a single family's stories to the experiences of hundreds of millions of people of varying cultures and economic situations over a period of decades.
Mao as, "the reason for it" is ahistorical mythmaking. It's a cartoonish narrarive for liberal ideology that depends on Great Man Theory for storytelling because in cases like these the goal was and us villification and orientalist tropes about ignorant controlled masses. The all actual experiences, who carried out what acts, who killed who, etc, was actually quite complex and administered in a way that varied locally - and was designed and implemented by teams, not just one guy. In addition, there was a cycle of action-reaction-reaction-reaction-(...) of attempting to correct perceived mistakes that is largely ignored in these fairytales. Of recognizing, e.g., the folly of culling sparrows, and reversing the action in response to recommendations from a team of ecologists. Similarly, the positive impact of decimating the other 3 focus "pests" tends to be ignored in these narratives and the negative impact of culling sparrows exaggerared or at least given the least charitable guesswork, simply to fit a narrative.
+1 to reading Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts
@TheOubliette @doctorfail Thank you for your unique unsupported opinion of this book!
Dikötter is widely criticized by historians and sociologists. He's only praised in mainstream lay press by people who don't know anything about this topic. He wrote for that lay audience, not academic, because it is easier to launder his bias and dishonesty to an audience with no familiarity on this topic, which is why I said to become informed before reading him in order to avoud miseducation.
You can feel free to read those histories and criticisms, as you should always do before accepting or recommending a pop history book.
What would you consider actual histories? I’m always happy to add more things on my own reading list.
There are many out there and it's a challenge for me to recommend a specific order and set because I would want to think about tailoring it for a given person or audience. China is a large and multicultural country, the target of immense negative propaganda, and has an oft-ignored history of being colonized that is an essential part of the story. In another comment I recommended Wemheuer as a competent liberal historian, but that was only for the topic of famine when Mao was chairman, a counterpoint to Dikötter. Reading Wemheuer alone will give an incomplete picture and will be embedded with the author's capitalistic and Western biases, so I then recommended reading Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts as a contextualizing piece and an introduction to a more appropriate historical, economic, and ecological framing of famine in China and other colonized and imperialized countries. But really there is a ton to read and I don't know which parts you would be most interested in. If you give me some direction I can recommend some works.
@TheOubliette Thanks.
np!