Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter
An unprecedented and groundbreaking history of Chinas Great Famine that reexamines the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the Peoples Republic of China.
Between 1958 and 1962, Mao Zedong threw his country into frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe China had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.
Access to Communist Party archives has long been denied to all but the most loyal historians, but now a new law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that fundamentally change the way the Maoist era can be studied. Frank Dikotters astonishing, riveting and magnificently detailed book chronicles an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented.
Dikotter shows that instead of lifting the country and proving the power of communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward was a disastrous step in the opposite direction. Piecing together both the vicious machinations in the corridors of power and the everyday experiences of ordinary people, Dikotter at last gives voice to the over 45 million dead and disenfranchised. Exhaustively researched and brilliantly written, this magisterial, groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the Peoples Republic of China.
Frank Dikotter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has pioneered the use of archival sources and published nine books that have changed the way historians view modern China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China to his last book entitled China Before Mao The Age of Openness. Frank Dikotter is married and lives in Hong Kong.
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