How China Became “Red”

Of all faults in Frank Dikötter’s Red Dawn Over China, the most obvious is his insistent focus on the hypocrisy, violence, and brutality of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Somewhat muted but still detectable is a disdain for the weaknesses of the CCP’s past political opponents, the Nationalists (Guomindang or Kuomintang), and any deep accounting of Japan’s past aggression against China, all of which have already been extensively examined elsewhere. Barely considered are also the liberal western democracies which failed to support the only chance China had in the Twentieth Century to develop into a free society. Nonetheless, Red Dawn very effectively uses difficult primary material to provide a very readable, much-needed correction to the CCP’s romantic origin mythology.

Indeed, if one desired to nitpick Dikötter’s approach, one could instead skip Red Dawn and simply diligently ignore the decades of lies and propaganda, repeated ad nauseum by communists and fellow travelling useful idiots to unsuspecting students across the political spectrum. Truly deluded believers that the CCP under Mao Zedong ever was a preferred route for China’s development should stay far away from being in the same room as Red Dawn’s pages. Those especially blessed with ignorance of Japan’s crippling effect on the Nationalist attempts to rebuild China, or of Soviet Russian infiltration and subversion tactics, may rest easier believing that Dikötter is merely a biased extremist revisionist bent on maligning the CCP’s latest “Chinese Dream”. Reading Red Dawn’s eight chapters risks discovering that the CCP conquest of China was not a result of social revolution, but rather a twisted route from the CCP birth as an insignificant group of dreaming puppets, so hardened by their own desire for power such that violence and tyranny became their standard operating procedure, who were able to succeed through leveraging Japan’s aggression towards defeating the CCP’s Nationalist opponents. Red Dawn corrects decades of CCP and fellow travelling lies and propaganda.

Chapter 1 traces how the CCP began as a fragile Moscow-supported puppet. Chapter 2 follows the party’s early alliance politics in the 1920s, continued dependence on Soviet Russia, the collapse due to CCP extremism of the First United Front alliance with the Nationalists, and the CCP’s political marginalization after 1927. Chapter 3 sees the shift from urban revolution to rural base areas, where the CCP tried seizing property and territory, systemizing violence, pillaging and destroying local economies, and earning an equivalence to marauding bandit hordes. Chapter 4 covers the CCP’s near-destruction in the mid-1930s, saved by the distraction of Japanese aggression, all maneuvered by Mao Zedong to strengthen his own grip on the CCP. Chapter 5 focuses on the Yan’an (Yenan) years, where Mao and the CCP perfected their propaganda, especially through outsiders, whose favorable reporting helped promote the communist myth. Chapter 6 deals with the early anti-Japanese war years, which crippled the Nationalists but allowed the CCP to expand while attracting idealistic recruits with lies of a “New Democracy” violated by the CCP’s own ruthless applications of purges and wasteful sacrifices for the benefit of Mao’s power. Chapter 7 moves to the end of the Second World War and the reopening of civil war, as Soviet Russian intervention and munitions transfers enabled the CCP’s conventional military. Chapter 8 narrates the final civil war campaigns from 1947 to 1949 and the CCP conquest of China, through siege, starvation, subversion, coercion, use of human shields, and the collapse of Nationalist resistance. Throughout, American influencers and policy makers are at best naïvely empathetic or ignorant, and undercut the CCP’s opposition. Dikötter concludes that the 1949 CCP victory was never a popular social revolution but the outcome of primarily ruthless and devious violence.

Red Dawn exposes CCP mythology, unraveling decades of lies and misinformation which has vaulted Maoism into an enduring sainthood among our own “Resistance” leftists in and out of college campuses. Despite the evidence of CCP atrocities after 1949, and even past 1989 under the remnants of Maoist era leadership, there are still believers in the fairy tale origins of CCP saintly victimhood as agrarian reformers. Red Dawn instead describes how the CCP habitually forced civilians to take part in CCP atrocities, to implicate the civilians in CCP pogroms and to enforce an artificial loyalty from fear of retribution from survivors. All this while destroying local economies through ideological delusions, much as would be repeated once seizing power. Even today, while China itself may have largely discarded the bulk of its former collectivism, modern socialists somehow ignore how CCP economic failures from “eating the rich” policies hampered CCP growth both before and after 1949.

CCP sympathizers might complain that Red Dawn appears to uncritically accept potentially biased accounts of CCP atrocities. However, the histography of CCP rise has always been subject to accusations of biased sources, regardless of ideological side. But the CCP’s violent and brutal tendencies, thoroughly documented by Red Dawn, were indeed proven once the CCP seized power after 1949; whether through struggle sessions, famine-inducing forced collectivization, “cultural revolution”, or tanks crushing student demonstrators; tens of millions of deaths attest to the CCP’s brutal methods. Furthermore, decades of uncritical propagandistic accounts favoring the CCP have long been embedded in our academic and popular psyche. If Dikötter might sound strident, it is because the drone of leftist delusions have been so long and so loud and penetrating.

CCP apologists might also suggest that Dikötter mistakenly emphasizes only the ugliest and most cynical elements of communist conduct, overcorrecting past historical narratives by overlooking how the CCP was politically nimble and adaptive. But putting aside how “adaptive” here would be merely another term for hypocrisy and opportunism, a claim of political adaptiveness only begs the question of how the CCP was able to be “adaptive”. Admittedly, that adaptive question might not be fully addressed by Red Dawn, already burdened with countering accumulated decades of misinformation, but the answer is plainly that if the Nationalists had simply been as brutal and violent as the CCP, if Japan had been more efficient in their own atrocities as the CCP, and if foreign observers had seen through CCP lies, then the CCP would not have had the time to “adapt”.

The Nationalists with all their faults lacked the systematic utter self-righteous fanaticism necessary to herd unwilling civilians ahead to shield CCP offensives, or to bury political opponents alive. Nor did the Japanese who were focused largely on defeating the Nationalists, act with a single-minded intent of eliminating the CCP threat, as compared to the CCP primary focus on growing CCP’s own power and attacking the Nationalists, even while China was in an existential war with Japan. Red Dawn’s documentation of the CCP’s consistent behavior pattern proves CCP’s consistent tendencies. And those CCP tendencies were not discarded even once they had no serious remaining opposition except imaginary ones to blame (similar to how the imaginary “Anti-Bolshevik” group described by Red Dawn was used conveniently to “rectify” CCP political purity during the 1930s).

Dikötter is not overcorrecting when the existing narrative is still so strenuously fostered by an autocratic CCP addicted to censorship and flush with propaganda funding, now with strengthened global reach, whether by CCP security forces, technological hacks, or soft power infiltration. There continues to be a deep fawning acceptance of CCP mythology. Our own public libraries still readily hold modern hagiographic accounts of the CCP’s rise, often supplied from CCP-approved sources, along with copies of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, the 1937 Maoist glorification piece which is the apparent inspiration for Red Dawn’s title. Banks of bots and paid social media postings shill for CCP legitimacy and whitewash CCP’s past. In addition, Dikötter’s correction is essential to deflate the continuing romanticization of supposed revolutionaries and “Resistance” cosplayers.

Decades of revolutionaries enamored with CCP success copied and promoted Maoist delusions, which even when able to seize power proved unable to provide economic relief to their subjects. Armed with the seductive views of how the CCP supposedly gained social legitimacy, countless leftists have excused radical violence when far more moderate reforms would have been far less costly and far more successful and beneficial. As Red Dawn points out, there were hardly any refugees that ran towards CCP controlled regions. Even today, there globally are no mass migrations towards leftist regions, while there is always interest in leaving leftist regimes which have destroyed their own economies. In fact, the CCP was only able to rapidly improve China’s economy after abandoning communist collectivization, after costly decades of stagnation and great leaps backwards.

Deflating the CCP myth is essential towards any hope for those who still refuse to recognize the progressive and prosperity differences between Taiwan and China, or between South Korea and North Korea, or even how a once-freer Hong Kong had developed while outside communist clutches. The often-used claim that there are a “Chinese” or some other ethnic cultural need for CCP-type rule is sadly promoted by naïve ignorance of the human cost of achieving that CCP-type of rule perfumed by a supposed social legitimacy excusing war crimes. The CCP’s route to power was, and remains, inseparable from terror, expropriation, fractious violence, and both brutal and subtle thought control. Red Dawn expertly documents how CCP conduct is not an accidental development of Communist rule after 1949 but inherent aspects of CCP political practice.

The fact is that for decades, studies of CCP development have magnified Nationalists’ failures as justification for the CCP’s rise, while largely ignoring the CCP’s own role in sabotaging the Nationalists’ attempts at progress. Whines of Nationalist “White Terror” ignored how “Red Terror” was practiced even while there was a supposed United Front, before the White Terror began. Accusations against the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek for initiating White Terror ignore how Mao Zedong had already previously reported that communist revolution promised violence, and how captured Russian documents revealed plans to eliminate Chiang Kai-shek. Lurid narratives of how the Nationalists allied with bad elements such as the “notorious Green Gang” ignored how the CCP itself attempted to utilize bandits and thugs when the opportunity arose, if not directly acting just like bandits and thugs itself.

And while Nationalist failures and weaknesses have been studied by many to explain CCP victory, there have been little consideration of Nationalist successes. Here, Red Dawn does provide some lesser recognized instances, such as: Chiang Kai-shek’s relatively efficient and painless consolidation of Nationalists’ Central Government authority by deliberately pursuing the CCP’s Long March into territories which were still independent of central authority; the Nationalists’ elimination of the “Unequal Treaties” source of China’s humiliation from the Nineteenth Century; and the Nationalists’ resistance against Japan during the Second World War. Red Dawn’s accounts of CCP cumulative conventional military failures from its first break from the Nationalists until after Japan’s defeat by the Nationalists with Allied support would suggest that if the CCP had been leading the resistance against Japan, China might have fallen to Japan even before Pearl Harbor.

In contrast, the CCP has attempted to legitimize itself with overblown claims of their resisting Japan’s invasion while the world ignored how the Nationalists did the actual fighting and dying, as Nationalists were the genuine allies against the Fascist Axis while the CCP largely hid in the hills and sold opium. The fact is that the CCP managed only one arguably large-scale campaign throughout the entire war, which was a disaster for CCP forces and horrifically costly for the Chinese civilians abandoned to Japanese retaliation. The CCP also constantly claimed to be patriotically acting for the Chinese people while constantly following Russia-centric foreign orders from Moscow, ultimately even after seizing power still to obediently sacrifice multiple tens of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” during the Korean War to prop up a North Korean dictatorship whose people still suffer in stark comparison against their South Korean cousins who escaped communism’s grip.

Under such conditions, Red Dawn understandably focuses on the primary driving force of violence for the CCP’s rise. Additional factors, such as the Nationalists’ inability to consolidate and stabilize China, in the few short years of only nominal Nationalist control before a crippling Japanese onslaught allowed the CCP’s final coup, have already been dissected for decades with biases too numerous to recount. In fact, there is far more need to wonder why the CCP after decades of uninterrupted secure rule, with far greater gross resources, has still not achieved the better living standards and freedoms of their cousins in Taiwan, against whom the CCP constantly threatens invasion. Any sentimentality towards the CCP’s historical methods encourages a disregard for the threat which the CCP today provides, both active and hidden, not only against Taiwan, but also against the world community.

In the current environment of conflicting “news”, dueling “truths”, and ideological blindness; Red Dawn provides a caution that ignoring reality, for the sake of sweet propagandistic platitudes cloaked by seductive catch phrases, risks domination by a harsh master. The sad fact is that much of Red Dawn was known by those who fled the 1949 “liberation”. Following generations have too often forgotten or have had the truth hidden from them. If Red Dawn clarifies, for just one clueless romantic sporting a Mao Zedong t-shirt, that the CCP was never a victim, and that the CCP’s legitimacy was and remains a lie, to others and to themselves, then Red Dawn would have justified its printing.

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Our Reviewer: Ching Wah Chin, a member of NYMAS, has lectured and written widely on East Asian History. His reviews include The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat, Future War and the Defence of Europe, Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaign, December 1943-August 1944, Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914, All the World at War, On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War, China's Spies, The Greater Second World War, War in Modern China, and Chinese Culture and the Chinese Military.

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Note: Red Dawn Over China is also available in paperback, audio, & e-editions.

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