For many years now Frank Dikötter has been shining a light on the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), revealing the full horrors of the Great Leap Forward and ‘land reform’ in books such as The Cultural Revolution (2016) and Mao’s Great Famine (2010). In his new book, Red Dawn Over China, he carries the story back into the regime’s origins, from the founding of the party in 1921 to its conquest of mainland China almost thirty years later. An outstanding scholar, he has worked his way through reams of Chinese central and provincial archives. Access to these archives remains, as he puts it, ‘haphazard at best’, but he has nevertheless managed to draw on over three hundred volumes of original party documents which have ‘found their way across the border into Hong Kong’ and now constitute his principal source. 

It is hard to dispute the reliability of that source when it manifestly consists not of attacks by political enemies but of reports and analyses emanating from the party itself. These documents mostly date from 1930 on, when the CCP started establishing its first long-term bases in the Chinese countryside, but he has covered the party’s first decade by studying an impressive range of Chinese and foreign newspapers and reports from Western missionaries in remote outposts submitted to the consulates of the United States, Britain and France. 

Drawing on this material, Dikötter presents a sickening indictment of the CCP’s record. The bands of activists who arrived in the villages in the late 1920s punished local counter-revolutionaries with an orgy of atrocities. One example will have to suffice. In November 1927, a CCP activist named Peng Pai presided