Ever since Frank Dikötters first book . . . this prolific star of China studies has challenged conventional truths and broached taboo subjects . . . Dikötter succeeds at bringing different strands together in a highly readable narrative that challenges the foundational myths of the CCP . . . A valuable reminder that todays China the prosperous, technologically advanced superpower is a country built on a foundation of violence . . . A tireless chronicler of the numerous crimes and follies of Chinese Communism, Dikötter once again shows his readers who was pulling the trigger of that gun -- Sergey Radchenko * Financial Times * Frank Dikötter has rewritten the early history of the Chinese Communist Party from the ground up. Drawing on archival materials long thought inaccessible, he strips away decades of myth to reveal a story of improvisation, violence and opportunism. Written with precision and verve, Red Dawn Over China is the most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years -- PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed Animating . . . Maos victory, he argues, owed little to popular enthusiasm and even less to the intrinsic appeal of communist ideas His pages teem with arrests, purges, sieges, starvation and fear -- Pratinav Anil * The Times * Dikötter makes his case clearly and unequivocally . . . Dikötter backs his case up with a deep body of primary sources including archival materials available only in restricted circulation, showcasing the assiduous research typical of this Dutch writers work, which encompasses 13 books on the history of China . . . Does a service to historians and general readers in showing the receipts . . . Explains why rose-tinted or romantic views of the communist revolution urgently need revision . . . The violence at the centre of the partys project cannot be denied by historians, even if it is rarely mentioned in the partys narrative of its own rise . . . The moral anger at Red Dawn Over Chinas heart brooks no argument -- Rana Mitter * New Statesman * The assertion [ that the ascent of the Chinese Communist Party constituted a revolution] is the CCPs founding claim to legitimacy for the Party, but Dikötter describes a slow seizure of power characterized by ruthless violence, deception and narrative manipulation, facilitated by the Soviet Union and aided by fortuitous external events, important among them Japans full-scale invasion of China in 1937. The Communists, he argues, never managed to stimulate a popular revolutionary movement, despite years of effort . . . Red Dawn over China tells a powerful story that draws heavily on the CCPs archives . . . Dikötters evidence is hard to deny -- Isabel Hilton * TLS * An iconoclastic history of communism in China that makes for unpleasant but ultimately important reading . . . This new book provides excellent coursework. Its author . . . is one of the most accomplished historians of modern China. Red Dawn Over China draws on a multitude of archival and other sources in Chinese, Russian, French, German and English to provide the most comprehensive and critical (in the best historians sense of the word) one-volume account of the communists rise to power yet published . . . His aim is to wrest back control over this crucial period in Chinas history and subject it to evidence-based scrutiny in simple terms, to tell the truth . . . Dikötter exposes the shibboleths that characterise the official history of Chinese communism for what they are . . . Dikötter has produced a work of historical iconoclasm that will be challenged in some quarters and banned in others . . . A first-class piece of scholarship that sheds light not only on the many dark chapters in the communist conquest of China but also on the complicated wider environment that made it possible -- Graham Hutchings * BBC History Magazine * An outstanding scholar . . . Perhaps in the distant future, the people of China will have the opportunity to compare versions of their 20th-century history and arrive at something like a balanced assessment. When that day comes, due credit will have to be given to Frank Dikötter for his achievement in ensuring, almost single-handedly, that accounts of this period are no longer the work of the victors alone -- Philip Snow * Literary Review * Writing about the pre-1949 era, Dikötter does so with confidence, fluency, and importantly balance . . . Dikötter is good at presenting his reader with a ground-level vision of how things unfolded, and deploys first-hand accounts from British, French and American witnesses who were there -- Kerry Brown * History Today * Frank Dikötters books have changed the way historians view China. Red Dawn Over China is a commanding new history of Chinas path to Communism, brought to the people at the barrel of a gun -- Maggie Fergusson * Tablet * A systematic dissection of the party in its formative years Dikötter does much to demystify events based on the sources available * Economist * An account of the surprising realities behind the Communist partys rise in China, from years of plundered villages and minimal popular support to survival under Japanese occupation. Dikötter, an acclaimed historian of China, traces how, with Soviet backing and relentless determination, a marginal movement became a world force * Financial Times, What to Read in 2026 * Anyone interested in the future of the Peoples Republic of China should first study its past. Reading Red Dawn Over China is the best way to start -- H. R. McMASTER, author of Dereliction of Duty
