Frank Dikötter is the author of The People’s Trilogy (“a series of books that document the impact of communism on the lives of ordinary people in China on the basis of new archival material”) and, most recently, China After Mao. He has served as Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006 — “one wonders for how much longer,” Tunku Varadarajan added in his Wall Street Journal review of China After Mao.
In the podcast below Hoover Institution Payson J. Treat distinguished research fellow Michael Auslin interviewed Dikötter in connection with his new book (“and how the West misunderstands the Party’s nature, and why the idea of a liberalizing China has always been a chimera”). Dikötter himself is a senior fellow at Hoover. His Hoover profile is posted here. The podcast gives me the occasion to introduce Dikötter and to bring his books to the attention of interested readers.
Dikötter posts two People’s Trilogy reviews by my wonderful teacher Jonathan Mirsky here and here. Jonathan reviewed Dikötter’s third People’s Trilogy book for the UK’s Spectator here.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.