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, more recently, China After Mao (2022). Dikötter serves 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. He also serves as the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Dikötter is the essential historian of Chinese Communism. He posted two reviews of his People’s Trilogy by my wonderful teacher Jonathan Mirsky here and here. Jonathan also reviewed Dikötter’s third People’s Trilogy book for the UK’s Spectator here.
Jonathan died in 2021. He isn’t here to review Dikötter’s new book, Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity. Dan Mahoney reviews it in the just-published issue of the Claremont Review of Books under the headline “Red and dead” and the CRB has just made it generally accessible online. Mahoney also touches on several of Dikötter’s previous books in his informative review.
