The tragedy of liberation A history of the Chinese revolution, 1945-1957

Dikotter'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." Dikotter 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. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A further catalog of horrors courtesy of Mao Zedong. In this prequel to his Samuel Johnson Prizewinning Mao's Great Famine (2010), Diktter (Humanities/Univ. of Hong Kong) mines the Communists' grisly early slog to power through the lives of everyday people. The victory of the Communists over Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists proclaimed on October 1, 1949, was supposed to bring liberation for everyone. A new orthodoxy had to be instilled in the masses, gleaned from Soviet training and Nationalist holdover ideas--e.g., a more rigorous registration of households and individuals according to class labels that would stick with them forever: good (revolutionaries, peasants) or bad (landlords, capitalists). As the police moved in to purge subversives, people scrambled to declare their allegiances to the new regime, "re-educate" themselves and denounce one another. As he did in his previous work, Diktter wades deep into the grim reality, starting with the establishment of land reform, which helped whip up class hatred in the countryside so that laborers turned against the village leaders and traditional bonds were broken in favor of party loyalty. Poverty prevailed, the economy shut down, and suspicion was rampant: Mao warned of "secret agents andbandits" still lurking and struck at the imperialist enemy on the Sino-Korean border in October 1950. The Great Terror ensued, followed by the suppression of foreigners, religious people, and even rats and vermin (due to a hysteria over germ warfare). The implementation of collectivization, based on the Soviet model, would seal the coffin for the masses, introducing famine and starvation. Diktter marshals his meticulous research to show how Mao continually set up expectations only to mow them viciously down. Under the "shiny surface" of Mao's propaganda, the author ably reveals the violence and misery.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.