Jason Furman's Reviews > The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

A brutal book, sometimes to the point of being repetitive, about the Chinese liberation--the triumph of Mao over the Chiang Kai-shek and the first year's of the People's Republic of China including the consolidation of the Communist party's control, land reform, thought reform, and briefly at the end the "hundred flowers bloom" period setting up the Great Leap Forward that is covered in the next volume of the trilogy. The book focuses on the consequences of all of this for the people of China--the ways in which the communists set quotas for killing (which were more often floors than ceilings), their network of concentration camps, how collectivization became serfdom, etc. He argues that while China appeared to progress enormously through 1956 the people themselves were materially much worse off in terms of food, healthcare, living accommodations, etc. Frank Dikötter traces all of this directly to Mao's desire to be more Stalinist than Stalin, documenting the ways in which Mao became worse after Stalin's restraint was gone after 1953.

The Tragedy of Liberation depicts nothing at all redeeming about the communist control of China, all of the violence is directly attributed to the ignorance and vainglory of Mao, with little role for broader political or social developments--beyond a describioption of Mao's love/hate relationship with Stalin and the impact that events in the Eastern Bloc had on China--including Kruschev's secret speech and Hungary's revolt.

This is the first in a trilogy--the next volume covers the Great Leap Forward and associated famine. The last volume covers The Cultural Revolution. I will certainly be reading them.