By C Uday Bhaskar
China’s Communist Party of China (CCP) maintains very strict control over the discourse and narrative that frames the emergence of the party as the revered saviour of the nation that was born in October 1949. The communist party is the core of modern China, and Chairman Mao Zedong is deified as the central figure—the principal founder of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and the new China.
The CCP’s narrative portrays 1949 as the inevitable triumph of a ‘people’s revolution’ driven by broad peasant and worker support, heroic struggle against imperialism/feudalism, successful land reform, and patriotic resistance to Japan. The hagiography is understandable.
From Hagiography to Hidden Archives
This is exactly the ‘fairytale’ that the book under review dismantles in a persuasive, brisk and unifocal manner. Frank Dikotter, an acclaimed Dutch historian of modern China (currently at the University of Hong Kong), relies in the main on a treasure trove of archival material that he was able to access in Hong Kong.
As he notes in the preface: “A window into the past is offered as a result of a formidable enterprise undertaken by the Party itself between 1981 and 1989. The Central Party Archives, under the control of the Central Committee, working in collaboration with provincial archives from every corner of the country, produced well over 300 volumes (400 to 600 pages per volume) containing original Party documents from 1923 to 1949.”
These volumes were meant for restricted circulation and not for sale and “intended for the senior party members only”. The need to control dissemination of such material would have been even more heightened in the aftermath of Tiananmen (1989). Hence, while these 300-plus volumes were quarantined within China, they “found their way across the border into Hong Kong.” It is evident that Dikotter has diligently trawled these volumes and similar archival material held in Taiwan and by the Great Powers (Britain, France, USA and Russia) and distilled his findings into Red Dawn Over China.
The title of this book inverts the most influential book about China, the CCP and Mao—Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China (1937). The glow of the ‘Red Star’ is transmuted by Dikotter into a more critical Red Dawn Over China, and the contrast is striking.
Barrel of a Gun
Snow depicted Mao and the CCP as destined national saviours with genuine revolutionary fervour and peasant backing during the Long March and Yan’an era. It was hugely influential in shaping positive Western views and contrasting the CCP favourably against ‘corrupt’ Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. The Dikotter book portrays the CCP as marginal for much of its early history, only gaining dominance through external circumstances and unrelenting brutality. It covers the period from the post-1911 republican chaos and the 1919 May Fourth Movement, through the civil war, emphasising contingency and opportunism over destiny.
Divided into eight chapters, the book covers the period 1921 to 1949, from the incubation of the CCP to the civil war (1945-49) and the final triumph when the communist forces force the Nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-shek to retreat from Canton to Chongqing to Chengdu. And the curtain came down for the nationalists when they had to flee to Taipei and “Chiang himself was one of the last to board a plane, leaving with his son Ching-kuo on 10 December, never to return”.
The evidence marshalled by the author is compelling and his conclusion is searing: “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 people at the barrel of a gun.” The numbers culled by the author to prove his findings are unassailable.
Dikotter avers that the CCP succeeded in wresting power primarily due to massive financial and military aid from the Soviet Union, Japan’s brutal occupation during World War II, which weakened the nationalist government (Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek and strategic miscalculations by the United States.
Contrary to the ‘fairytale’ version of how the communists came to power, Dikotter asserts that it was the CCP’s ruthless determination to seize power ‘at all costs’, often through violence and opportunism rather than widespread support via land reform or anti-Japanese heroism (as official histories claim), that enabled the Red Dawn of October 1949.
A visible degree of certitude permeates this book and this is derived, perhaps, from the impressive body of work on China that Dikotter has to his credit beginning with The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992). This was followed by the trilogy: Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013) and The Cultural Revolution (2016).
The current volume is a befitting prequel to the earlier scholarship and the Dikotter verdict about the CCP is acerbic. The progressive vision the party proposed after the ‘Liberation’ of October 1949, in tune with the modern age was a facade. “In reality, the CCP, not least their Chairman, became more determined than their opponents in carrying out unrestricted warfare, devoid of any rules… and excelled in a very traditional pursuit of power.”
The preface to the book is import-laden and the author captures the essence of the CCP and its orientation apropos the adversary—whether external or domestic: “when at long last in a position to attack, overwhelm the enemy in a war of relentless attrition. Most of all, believe in the cause” (emphasis added).
It would have been more rewarding to the reader if the major assessments/conclusions about the CCP in its formative decades, as deduced by the author, were extrapolated to the current phase in Chinese governance—the Xi Jinping era and the continuities that merit comment elucidated. If the Snow fairytale of China and the dystopian Dikotter interpretation are bookended, there are other authors who have offered a more nuanced and sympathetic account of the emergence of China and the role of the CCP. Chalmers Johnson’s Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (1962) , Odd Arne Westad’s Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War (2003) and Rana Mitter’s China’s Good War (2022) are illustrative. Incidentally, only Westad figures in the bibliography.
Is there a case for a ‘Red Twilight’—one that would synthesise a glowing star and the more violent dawn that heralded the birth of modern China ?
C Uday Bhaskar is director, Society for Policy Studies
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.