Shortly after he secured his third term in power in October 2022, Xi Jinping took the top members of his Politburo to the north-western Chinese city of Yan’an – perhaps the closest thing that Chinese communism has to a sacred site. It was where, during China’s two-decade civil war, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ultimately came to rest after the famous Long March of 1934-35; the city became the heart of the party, and the focal point of its leader Mao Zedong’s rise to power. Xi visited again in 2024, where he declared “it is necessary to continuously enhance political loyalty in the military to ensure the people’s armed forces always uphold their core values, maintain purity, and strictly adhere to discipline”. In retrospect, this seems like a warning that the purge of numerous senior generals in China’s army over the past year might have been foreseeable. It was also a broader reminder that divergent views of the party’s past are unwelcome.
In recent years, the CCP has been focusing on the interpretation of its own history, which means the limits on what China’s historians can write about it are narrower than ever. In the more liberal 1990s, some relatively frank memoirs and books about the CCP’s rise to power were published in the mainland, many of which were not flattering to major party leaders. Such publications are much harder to produce now, since they run the risk of being accused of “historical nihilism,” a bleak charge meaning readings of party history at odds with the official version.
Frank Dikötter’s Red Dawn over China certainly risks such a charge in the unlikely event it is ever released in the mainland. Yet if hard evidence was accepted as any sort of defence in a tribunal, he would have a watertight case. The book details the rise to power of the CCP in China from the 1910s to the 1949 revolution, and Dikötter makes his case clearly and unequivocally: “The key word is violence, and a willingness to inflict it. Communism was never popular in China, no more so than in Finland or in the United States, and it was brought to the population at the barrel of a gun.” Dikötter backs his case up with an deep body of primary sources including archival materials available only in restricted circulation, showcasing the assiduous research typical of this Dutch writer’s work, which encompasses 13 books on the history of China.
Dikötter argues that the communist movement came to power because of its unflinching willingness to inflict violence, its continuous support from the Soviet Union and its ability to seize opportunistically on its opponents’ woes.
The story begins in the 1920s when the Comintern, the new Soviet state’s international network, came to China to foment revolution. A short alliance between the communists and the larger nationalist (Kuomintang) party breaks up in acrimony, and the CCP must regroup in remote areas of the south-eastern Jiangxi province. Vicious infighting (a recurring theme) and nationalist campaigns force the party on the Long March to north-west China. All seems lost. But the Japanese invasion compels a new alliance with the nationalists, and wartime conditions allow the CCP to grow to more than a million. After the end of the Second World War, the weakened nationalists were defeated by the stronger, Soviet-backed communists in a civil war. The former fled to Taiwan in 1949, and the latter have ruled China ever since.
While this may be familiar to those who know modern Chinese history, Dikötter does a service to historians and general readers in showing the receipts. Every atrocity, every killing (there are hundreds of instances in the book) is meticulously footnoted. One example, which could stand in for many, concerns the fall of the communist Soviet area in Jiangxi province in 1934, where “mass graves were discovered” including a “burial site with 5,000 corpses” and “a thousand disembodied corpses along a river”. Dikötter came to prominence because of his multi-volume chronicle of the Mao era, detailing the horrors of the Great Famine during the Great Leap Forward, in which 20 million or more died, and the Cultural Revolution, in which a further 1.5 million likely perished. This is the prequel, in effect, and its unrelenting documentation of the party’s actions is similar in scope and tone. It’s no beach read.
Dikötter explains why rose-tinted or romantic views of the communist revolution urgently need revision. Yet the reader may still struggle to work out the answer to the question in the title: how did communism conquer a quarter of humanity? Why did the party win power, and why would anyone halfway decent join the movement in the first place? Soviet support and the use of terror get you so far, but there is something missing. The factor which, whatever one thinks of it, differentiated the CCP from, say, the multiple warlord armies that shaped modern China was ideology. Dikötter does address many of Mao’s various ideological shifts, such as his turn in 1940 to “New Democracy”. However, the analysis is more focused on the disparities between the stated progressive aims of the CCP and the reality of its terror tactics. For Dikötter this is what prevented supposedly democratic institutions from being effective; there is less here on the content of the ideas themselves.
Dikötter uses few diaries and memoirs of recruits to the CCP; he is perhaps suspicious that people might dissemble or even fool themselves about their reasons for joining the revolutionary movement. There are no idealists in his version of the party. Yet many recruits in the early years of the movement were highly critical about specific aspects of CCP policy, but also believed that they had entered a movement with significance well beyond the raw quest for power: for instance, the CCP power couple Li Rui and Fan Yuanzhen, the former of whom would eventually become a fierce critic of the party from within, both started as true believers. Few people, after all, would have given their lives or run terrible risks of arrest or execution for a warlord army: for many, the CCP really did seem like a new and better way for a China that was under constant siege from voracious outside powers, and seemed unable to unify internally.
The ruling Nationalist party of Chiang Kai-shek had become hollow by the late 1940s, not least as it was worn out by eight long years of war against Japan, while the Red Army was, as Dikötter shows, certainly prone to desertion and plagued by internal divisions that weakened it at crucial moments. But some of the most important military figures – Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao, Zhu De and, indeed, Mao Zedong – were also genuinely skilled military tacticians whose judgement about when to take risks also frequently paid off, and who combined political indoctrination with military strategy. They were capable of the most appalling cruelty – as in Dikötter’s harrowing account of the siege of the city of Changchun, where the CCP refused to allow civilian refugees to leave, starving thousands to death. But without at least some significant tactical skill, and the ability to learn from their military (if not moral) errors, they would not have conquered China.
Dikötter’s fine book should be read alongside other recent works that have broken new ground on the rise of Chinese communism. One is Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History (2019), which won the Cundill Prize in History. Lovell concentrates on the why rather than the what of Mao’s thought, and shows how his thought was adaptable enough to shape the thinking of places as far apart as impoverished rural Bengal and the student barricades in Paris in 1968. Similarly, Xiaofei Kang’s Enchanted Revolution (2023), shows how the CCP did not simply eliminate religion in the countryside, but used its tropes to persuade local populations to follow the party’s precepts by adapting local beliefs about ghosts and shamans. Neither book shies away from the violence and destruction that stood at the heart of the CCP’s project, but they concentrate more on the use of ideas than Dikötter does.
As to whether this account of the CCP’s rise gives an accurate account of the phenomenon it portrays, the answer is yes. The violence at the centre of the party’s project cannot be denied by historians, even if it is rarely mentioned in the party’s narrative of its own rise. One can take issue with Red Dawn’s account of the causes of the party’s ultimate victory. But the moral anger at its heart brooks no argument.
Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity
Frank Dikötter
Bloomsbury, 384pp, £25
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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