The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikötter

The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. As noted by the New York Times: ‘Drawn from hundreds of English language and Chinese eyewitness accounts, newly available archival records, online Cultural Revolution documentary projects and foreign and Chinese scholarship, the book paints such a damning portrait of Mao and Communist Party governance that if it were widely circulated in China, it could undermine the legitimacy of the current regime.’ The first part of the trilogy, Mao’s Great Famine, won the Samuel Johns Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011, the most prestigious British award for non-fiction.Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing', this is the final volume of 'The People's Trilogy', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine.Īfter the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 19, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. In these books he condemns both the regime and Mao Zedong personally and exposes the many abuses that took place under this rule.

Dikötter's recent books present many important insights and contain numerous previously unknown details. He wrote a trilogy about the Great Leap Forward ( Mao’s Great Famine, 2010), the initial years of the People’s Republic ( The Tragedy of Liberation, 2013) and, very recently, the Cultural Revolution ( The Cultural Revolution, 2016). In the past ten years of his career Dikötter's attention turned to China after the Communist victory in 1949. His best-known book is The Discourse of Race of Modern China (1992), which fundamentally revises earlier thinking on the development of ideas about race in China. In this endeavour he concentrated on aspects of westernisation and modernisation that were at odds with traditional Chinese morality and ethics, such as race, drugs, sex and sexuality, eugenics and prisons.

Pioneering researchĭikötter specialised in the Republican period in Chinese history (1912–1949) and conducted pioneering research on the interaction between Western and Chinese ideas, theories, prejudices and ideology.

Dikötter will receive this distinction in recognition of the tremendous importance of his work for scholars in the area of the history of the Chinese Republican period and for both the scholarly and social significance of his work on the history of the People’s Republic of China under Mao.

The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikötter