One Thing Japan, America and the Soviets Did Together? Help Mao Win

In “Red Dawn Over China,” the historian Frank Dikötter shows that Communism’s rise in China was an unlikely, violent event with a lot of outside help.

 

RED DAWN OVER CHINA: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, by Frank Dikötter

 

If asked about Mao Zedong’s legacy, Chinese Communist Party cadres recite a precise verdict on him: 70 percent good, 30 percent bad. Frank Dikötter would recoil at such arithmetical whitewashing. He’s renowned for writing an important trilogy of books about Mao’s reign over China, digging in far-flung archives to document the oppression and mass atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Although Chinese authorities continue to deny or downplay the grim realities of their past, Dikötter functions as something like a one-man truth commission, relentlessly excavating horrors that took tens of millions of lives.

 

In “Red Dawn Over China,” Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, delivers a powerful, engrossing and opinionated prequel to his trilogy, showing how the Communists battled their way to power in the decades after World War I.

 

Much of the book’s impact comes from the depth of research that Dikötter did, enterprisingly drawing on more than 300 volumes of internal party papers produced around the country, which found their way to Hong Kong. His ambition is to give a voice to the untold millions of Chinese who were silenced by utopian Communist violence and repression.

 

Dikötter argues that from the party’s founding in 1921 until the end of World War II in 1945, Mao’s revolutionaries were utterly marginal. Even by the overblown figures of the Communist International, China before 1940 had perhaps one Communist per 1,700 people — a number roughly similar to the United States at the time.

 

So how did this tiny band take over a country as enormous as China? Dikötter’s answer is blunt: “The key word is violence, and a willingness to inflict it.” Far from an overwhelming mass movement that inevitably swept to power, Dikötter retells the Chinese Revolution as an unlikely event, propelled less by popular support than by unyielding cruelty and not a little bit of luck.

 

Mao also had outside help, a common feature of civil wars. Although the Chinese revolutionaries styled themselves as representing the authentic will of the people, Dikötter argues that on several occasions their movement was shaped and saved by foreigners — in particular, the Soviet Union. China’s Communist activists took inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution and got training, indoctrination and weapons from Soviet agents in China. In 1926, a Comintern agent from the Soviet Union appointed a 32-year-old Mao to run an institute training activists to organize the peasants.

 

Despite Joseph Stalin’s assistance, the Chinese Communists were nearly obliterated in the mid-30s by the armies of the Nationalist government led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The Communists had not won over the urban workers, and despite the appeal of land redistribution, rural villagers feared the terror and exploitation of Communist troops.

 

Farmers were also more worried about droughts, floods and frost than an exploitative merchant class. By the time the Communists finished their desperate retreat from the Nationalists in the Long March in 1935, Dikötter acerbically writes, their ranks were so depleted that they “had roughly the same popular appeal as an obscure religious sect or minor secret society.”

 

This time the Communists were saved by, of all things, Japanese aggression. After Japanese forces stormed into China’s northeastern vastness of Manchuria in 1931, the Communists remained preoccupied with fighting the Nationalists, not the foreign invaders. In 1937, Imperial Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China — a catastrophe that would claim the lives of some 14 million Chinese people. Mao, despite entering a fractious and temporary United Front with the Nationalists, preferred to let Nationalist troops bear the brunt of Japan’s onslaught as the Communist armies regrouped and established control of new territories.

 

While other histories, such as the Harvard political scientist Tony Saich’s authoritative “From Rebel to Ruler,” have discussed the difficulty that the Communists had in reaching the working class and the peasants, Dikötter spends little time on the party’s socioeconomic or cultural blandishments, instead concentrating on its violence and indoctrination.

 

In the areas they conquered, Dikötter writes, Communists imposed “a state of terror,” executing local officials and those considered “politically unreliable.” He chillingly shows the Communists trying “to destroy the old order overnight” with an onslaught against Confucianism, religious institutions and village life that foreshadowed the Cultural Revolution decades later: “People were set against each other in so-called ‘struggle meetings,’ denouncing all authority, whether village elders, clan leaders or simply parents and siblings.”

 

The Communists got another invaluable boost from the Soviet Union when it finally entered the war against Imperial Japan, days after the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima. A million Soviet soldiers charged into Japanese-occupied Manchuria, a crucial strategic and economic prize. While Mao negotiated in bad faith about a coalition government with the Nationalists, the Soviets secretly connived with the Chinese Communists to facilitate their takeover of Manchuria after the Soviets departed. The Soviets provided the Communists with tanks, planes and weapons taken from the defeated Japanese Army.

 

Dikötter is withering on credulous Americans who misjudged the Communists, including Vice President Henry A. Wallace and the foreign correspondent Edgar Snow, whose popular 1937 book, “Red Star Over China,” serves as the foil for this book’s title. He also lambastes Gen. George C. Marshall’s doomed mission to pressure Chiang and Mao into a unified government in the first years after the war, treating him not as a peacemaker handed an impossible brief, but a sucker.

 

Yet, as the journalist Daniel Kurtz-Phelan shows in “The China Mission,” while Marshall unquestionably failed, he was wary of Communist trickery and propaganda, warning President Harry Truman in 1946 that China would always be vulnerable to Soviet subversion “so long as there remains a separate Communist government and a separate Communist army in China.”

 

Ending his book with the conquest of Tibet in the early ’50s, Dikötter ominously writes: “Only Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan still eluded the reach of the Chinese Communist Party.” Today the party faces serious headwinds at home, from high youth unemployment to Xi Jinping’s escalating purge of the military. Yet since 2017, Xi has taken to declaring that the world is experiencing “great changes unseen in a century,” with party elites taking Brexit and Donald Trump’s first election as evidence of a precipitous Western decline that facilitates their own ascendancy.

 

 

RED DAWN OVER CHINA: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity | By Frank Dikötter | Bloomsbury | 362 pp. | $33

 

Gary J. Bass, the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at Princeton University, is the author of “Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia.”” [1]

 

1. One Thing Japan, America and the Soviets Did Together? Help Mao Win.: Nonfiction. Bass, Gary J.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Feb 24, 2026.