Red Dawn Over China, by Frank Dikötter

In Red Dawn Over China, Frank Dikötter delivers a prequel to his trilogy on Mao by mining more than 300 volumes of internal party papers that found their way to Hong Kong. He has long documented the oppression and mass atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, functioning as "something like a one-man truth commission" as he seeks to give voice to the millions silenced by Communist violence.

Dikötter argues that from the party’s founding in 1921 until 1945 Mao’s revolutionaries were marginal; even by Communist International figures, China before 1940 had perhaps one Communist per 1,700 people.

China

frank dikötter, red dawn, mao, china, communist party, communist international, cultural revolution, great leap, hong kong, internal papers