The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 by Frank Dikötter – review

Among the more startling claims that Frank Dikötter makes in his new book, The Tragedy of Liberation, is that there were no landlords in China. The landlord – a key symbol of historic cruelty and oppression – is the central character in Chinese communist mythology, vilified in epic verse, in film, in opera, literature and even in sculpture in the group work Rent Collection Courtyard. Land reform, the party's overthrow of the landlords and the sharing of the spoils among the peasants in the early 1950s remains for many a redemptive moment in the tortured story of the Chinese revolution.

Dikötter is a historian at the University of Hong Kong whose previous book, Mao's Great Famine, a harrowing account of the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 60s, won the Samuel Johnson prize in 2011. This book covers the period immediately preceding that – from the end of the second world war to 1957.

It is conventionally regarded as a relatively less awful period of communist rule, partly because we know what followed: brutal forced collectivisation, mass starvation, labour camps, enslavement in pointless grandiose projects and, after the briefest of respites, the Cultural Revolution.

Dikötter gives short shrift to this benign view: on every page, he confronts his reader with new instances of brutality as the regime eliminated its rivals and set in place its apparatus of terror. When it relaxed, it was only to prepare the next assault.

Land reform symbolised the overthrow of the old order and the peasants' reward for their service to the revolutionary cause. Dikötter, though, argues it was a sham. He explores in some detail the process in Yuanbao, a village in Manchuria that won fame as the setting of a novel, The Hurricane, which was zealous enough to win the Stalin prize for literature in 1951. In the fictional account, fervent revolutionary peasants rose as one against their oppressors. In reality, Dikötter writes, the villagers in this and other family villages in China were conservative, their people bound together by ties of kinship and obligation, each living at much the same level as his neighbour. Only "a few ruffians and vagrants" were attracted to communism and they became the party activists who badgered the villagers into believing there was a landlord class that they might overthrow.

It took weeks of indoctrination to generate sufficient hatred for people to beat their neighbour to death. This process was repeated across the country and, at different times, against different targets until Mao's death in 1976. The victims were distinguished by nothing more than their victimhood: they could be as poor as their accusers – or poorer – without being saved. By this account, there was never a moment when liberation deliveredanything more than hunger, immiseration and servitude. Farmers were hungrier than before liberation, steadily reduced to a state-sponsored serfdom, tied to the land and rewarded in kind for their labour. Production plummeted, intellectuals, businessmen and petty shopkeepers were persecuted in turn.

Dikötter's work has aimed to demolish almost every claim to truth or virtue the Chinese Communist party ever made. He combines a vivid eye for detail with a historian's diligence in the archives., though he has been criticised by fellow scholars for his use of sources and attributions. Powerful though his work undoubtedly is, it leaves some questions unanswered: the CCP established complete control in a huge country that had been torn apart by war for the best part of 50 years. Was terror the only explanation?

In the beginning, at least, faith and hope played a part, however misplaced both turned out to be. At times, the Chinese revolution resembled a religious crusade in which people sought sacrifice and even martyrdom for a cause they were convinced was transcendent. Even when the party was at its most implacable and abusive, turning on the faithful as traitors or counter-revolutionaries, the victims often criticised themselves rather than the party, and submitted to its judgments. Dikötter is unsparing in his account of the effects of communist rule. There is still room for a closer understanding of what they thought they were doing, and why they succeeded.