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.
@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!