The Tragedy of Liberation
A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957
-
-
4.5 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- £12.99
Publisher Description
The second installment in 'The People's Trilogy', the groundbreaking series from Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Frank Dikötter
'For anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading' Anne Applebaum
'Essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions' Guardian
'Dikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order' Timothy Snyder
In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life.
In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao's court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dik tter's Mao's Great Famine (2010) won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011, and his prequel is just as well composed and heartbreaking to read. He draws on Chinese archives to detail the depth of tragedy, oppression, dehumanization, and death visited on the people of China under Mao's leadership before the horrifically misnamed "Great Leap Forward." Dik tter sets the stage in his preface, where he calls the initial period of the revolution "one of the worst tyrannies... of the twentieth century," which sent "to an early grave at least 5 million civilians." The book goes on to offer both statistical and anecdotal evidence of the hardships and terror that the Chinese endured; waves of collectivization in the countryside reduced villagers to near-starvation levels of diet, while in urban areas "capitalists" and "intellectuals" were forced to divest themselves of all property, and party members were subject to Mao's whims. Hunger, humiliation, torture, and suicide fill these pages. This isn't an easy book to read, especially as readers will already understand that the decade described here is only the beginning of Mao's reign of terror, but it is a vital study of a crucial period of history.
