Frank Dikötter’s The Cultural Revolution

Fittingly, the third and final work in historian Frank Dikötter’s trilogy of history books on modern china, The Cultural Revolution, was released exactly 50 years after Mao set the Cultural Revolution in motion, inaugurating a miniature civil war that would […]

Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine

In the four-year span between 1958 and 1962, some 45 million Chinese people lost their lives, mostly as a direct or indirect result of starvation. Within China, the figures have been downplayed or denied, and the causes obfuscated. Food shortages […]

Frank Dikötter’s The Tragedy Of Liberation

Consider for a moment the fate of the three most murderous regimes of the 20th century. Hitler’s Third Reich was vanquished by the combined might of the Allied powers, and his ideology thoroughly discredited. German schoolchildren visit Holocaust museums and […]