Ordinary Chinese citizens traded their memories of the Cultural Revolution for greater prosperity The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 By Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury Press, 432 pages, ...

Register now to join us for the book launch of Red Dawn Over China and understand the origins of China’s communist revolution. Frank Dikötter will be in discussion with Orville Schell.

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Have China’s “reform and opening up” policies, proclaimed from the late 1970s onwards, been the key to the ...

Alexander Pantsov is one of the few scholars to have gained exclusive access to the Russian State Archive's personal dossiers on Mao Zedong and other top members of the Chinese Communist Party. He ...

I’ve mentioned before how China’s startlingly recent experience with deprivation still shapes its people’s political thinking. In “Mao’s Great Famine,” Frank Dikötter explores the catastrophe that ...

Much Western wisdom on Communist China is of the conventional variety, with one belief in particular standing stubbornly unchallenged for decades. This is the view that Deng Xiaoping, the country’s ...

Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His books have changed the way historians view China. His newest work, China ...

In a small village in central China, a man was boiling meat. This was strange because it was 1961 and no one had meat. For more than two years they had all been starving, dying, in the largest famine ...

Given China’s growing influence on the future of the West, it is curious that so many of us still know so little about the country’s past. Readers and publishers have rarely shown much appetite for it ...

Frank Dikötter has now published no less than nine books on the modern history of China. Though some, such as his spirited evocation of the cosmopolitan China that flourished in the interwar period, ...

What's the biggest difference between Western apologists for Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin? Old Stalinists seem capable of recanting, but with Mao the emotional investment is still too great: Like ...