China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower

by Frank Dikötter

I spent a decade examining thousands of party records, travelling the length and breadth of the country from subtropical Guangdong to poor and arid Gansu, a province near the deserts of Mongolia. Inside yellowing folders, scribbled in longhand or neatly typed, were secret minutes of top party meetings, investigations into cases of mass murder, confessions of leaders responsible for the starvation of millions of villagers, reports on resistance in the countryside, confidential opinion surveys, letters of complaint written by ordinary people and much more besides. I wrote three books known as the ‘People’s Trilogy,’ on the fate of ordinary people under Mao. The timing was fortunate. After Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in November 2012, the archives began closing down again. Large batches of documents on Mao’s Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution have since been reclassified. But, paradoxically, the last couple of years have been a good time to explore the decades of ‘Reform and Opening Up’. For years the Chinese people, including every archivist, have been told that nothing short of an economic miracle took place after 1978, one that has left foreign capitalists gasping for breath. A dark cloud hangs over the Mao era, but it dissipates the moment the term ‘economic reform’ is invoked. Now, for the first time, we can actually use the evidence produced by the Communist Party to examine the history of the Communist Party since 1976.