Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti.
No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom.
In How to Be a Dictator, Frank Dikötter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders?
This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.

First published in 1992, The Discourse of Race in Modern China rapidly became a classic, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorisation became so widespread in China. After the country's devastating defeat against Japan in 1895, leading reformers like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei turned away from the Confucian classics to seek enlightenment abroad, hoping to find the keys to wealth and power on the distant shores of Europe. Instead, they discovered the notion of 'race', and used new evolutionary theories from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to present a universe red in tooth and claw in which 'yellows' competed with 'whites' in a deadly struggle for survival. After the fall of the empire in 1911, prominent politicians and writers in republican China continued to measure, classify and rank people from around the world according to their supposed biological features, all in the name of science. Racial thinking remains popular in the People's Republic of China, as serologists, geneticists and anthropometrists continue to interpret human variation in terms of 'race'. This new edition has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter taking the reader up to the twenty-first century.

Exotic Commodities is the first book to chart the consumption and spread of foreign goods in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. Richly illustrated and revealing, this volume recounts how exotic commodities were acquired and adapted in a country commonly believed to have remained "hostile toward alien things" during the industrial era.
China was not immune to global trends that prized the modern goods of "civilized" nations. Foreign imports were enthusiastically embraced by both the upper and lower classes and rapidly woven into the fabric of everyday life, often in inventive ways. Scarves, skirts, blouses, and corsets were combined with traditional garments to create strikingly original fashions. Industrially produced rice, sugar, wheat, and canned food revolutionized local cuisine, and mass produced mirrors were hung on doorframes to ward off malignant spirits.
Frank Dikötter argues that ordinary people were the least inhibited in acquiring these products and therefore the most instrumental in changing the material culture of China. Landscape paintings, door leaves, and calligraphy scrolls were happily mixed with kitschy oil paintings and modern advertisements. Old and new interacted in ways that might have seemed incongruous to outsiders but were perfectly harmonious to local people.
This pragmatic attitude would eventually lead to China's own mass production and export of cheap, modern goods, which today can be found all over the world. The nature of this history raises the question, which Dikötter pursues in his conclusion: If the key to surviving in a fast-changing world is the ability to innovate, could China be more in tune with modernity than Europe?

Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti. No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom. In How to Be a Dictator, Frank Dikoetter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders? This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.

The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China.After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

"Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikotter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikotter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful meshing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikotter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a 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 the country 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 one can study the Maoist era. Frank Dikotter's 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 among the world's superpowers and proving the power of communism, as Mao imagined, in reality the Great Leap Forward was a giant - and disastrous -- step in the opposite direction. He demonstrates, as nobody has before, that under this initiative the country became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history (at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death) but also the greatest demolition of real estate - and catastrophe for the natural environment - in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned to rubble and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. 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 dead and disenfranchised. Exhaustively researched and brilliantly written, this magisterial, groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

“The Chinese Communist party refers to its victory in 1949 as a 'liberation.' In China the story of liberation and the revolution that followed is not one of peace, liberty, and justice. It is first and foremost a story of calculated terror and systematic violence.” So begins Frank Dikötter's stunning and revelatory chronicle of Mao Zedong's ascension and campaign to transform the Chinese into what the party called New People. Following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, after a bloody civil war, Mao hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City, and the world watched as the Communist revolution began to wash away the old order. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known before now about the eight years that followed, preceding the massive famine and Great Leap Forward.
Drawing on hundreds of previously classified documents, secret police reports, unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, eyewitness accounts of those who survived, and more,
bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history. Interweaving stories of ordinary citizens with tales of the brutal politics of Mao's court, Frank Dikötter illuminates those who shaped the “liberation” and the horrific policies they implemented in the name of progress. People of all walks of life were caught up in the tragedy that unfolded, and whether or not they supported the revolution, all of them were asked to write confessions, denounce their friends, and answer queries about their political reliability. One victim of thought reform called it a “carefully cultivated Auschwitz of the mind.” Told with great narrative sweep,
is a powerful and important document giving voice at last to the millions who were lost, and casting new light on the foundations of one of the most powerful regimes of the twenty-first century.

In

“A blow-by-blow account ... An important corrective to the conventional view of China's rise.”--Financial Times

From internationally renowned historian Frank Dikötter, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, a myth-shattering history of China from the death of Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping.

Through decades of direct experience of the People's Republic combined with extraordinary access to hundreds of hitherto unseen documents in communist party archives, the author of The People's Trilogy offers a riveting account of China's rise from the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. He takes us inside the country's unprecedented four-decade economic transformation--from rural villages to industrial metropoles and elite party conclaves--that vaulted the nation from 126th largest economy in the world to second largest. A historian at the pinnacle of his field, Dikötter challenges much of what we think we know about how this happened. Casting aside the image of a society marching unwaveringly toward growth, in lockstep to the beat of the party drum, he recounts instead a fascinating tale of contradictions, illusions, and palace intrigue, of disasters narrowly averted, shadow banking, anti-corruption purges, and extreme state wealth existing alongside everyday poverty. He examines China's navigation of the 2008 financial crash, its increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference, and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. As this magisterial book makes clear, the communist party's goal was never to join the democratic world, but to resist it--and ultimately defeat it.

The second installment in 'The People's Trilogy', the groundbreaking series from Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Frank Dikötter

'For anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading' Anne Applebaum

'Essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions' Guardian

'Dikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order' Timothy Snyder

In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life.

In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao's court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths.

1958至1962年，中國變成了人間地獄。毛澤東將全國推向大躍進的狂潮，企圖以這種方式在十五年內趕上並超過英國。這場試驗最終導致了中國歷史上前所未有的大災難，奪去了數千萬人的生命。

馮客用精彩的文筆和豐富的細節，為我們呈現了一段被人們廣為猜測卻從未得知全貌的歷史。他查閱大量中國共產黨的檔案——不只中央檔案，還有各省省級檔案館，與不同地區的市級和縣級檔案館所藏資料，其中包括公安局的機密報告、黨內高層會議的詳細紀錄、未經修改的重要領導人的原始講話、農村工作的情況調查、集體殺戮案件的調查、祕密的民意調查與普通老百姓的檢舉信等等。這些檔案長久以來一直對外界保密，只有少數最受黨信任的歷史學者才能查閱，但在檔案法頒布之後，數千份中央及地方的檔案一度對外開放，徹底改變了人們研究毛澤東時代的方法。也是透過這些檔案，馮客得以拼湊出那段中國官方亟欲遺忘、不欲人知的過往。

本書的英文版出版後，立刻引起國際間的重視與討論，更贏得英國最具代表性的非小說類書獎——塞繆爾．約翰遜獎（Samuel Johnson Prize，後改稱巴美列．捷福獎 Baillie Gifford Prize）。評審團給予此書高度讚譽，有位評審稱「本書不僅在當下顯得重要，隨著中國在世界變得越來越有影響力、更為人所重視，它在某種程度上也會變得更為重要。」另一位評審則稱，馮客之作完全改變了他對於二十世紀的認識。過去西方世界談論二十世紀獨裁政權帶來的災難，多半聚焦希特勒與史達林，《毛澤東的大饑荒》一書則讓許多西方讀者警覺，當代中國也曾發生過這麼一段悲劇般的歷史。

當年的毛澤東想透過大躍進把中國提升為超級大國，並藉此向世人證明共產主義的力量，但終究痴人說夢，事與願違。然而在馮客之前，從未有人如此明確地證明這一點。大躍進運動最終發展成「人類歷史上最大規模的群體性殺戮之一」——至少四、五千萬人因過度勞累、飢餓或遭毒打而死；不僅如此，它還造成人類歷史上對建築物最大規模的崩毀、對自然環境帶來災難性的破壞。馮客透過龐雜檔案研究及內部人士採訪，以生動的敘述，把決策層的內幕與百姓的日常生活聯繫在一起，為死者和弱者發聲，這種寫法在同類題材的研究中絕無僅有，深刻挖掘出最貼近史實的闃黑面貌，令人怵目驚心、更令人掩卷嘆息。

《毛澤東的大饑荒》是想要認識二十世紀中國歷史的必讀之作。本次推出的新譯本，全面改正了原譯本的錯誤與疏漏，也讓馮客的經典作品以更為貼近原作的模樣，忠實呈現於中文世界的讀者面前。幾十年過去了，但往事並未如煙，當年那段時代的黑暗、政治的瘋狂，以及許許多多消逝在歷史中的無辜生命，都將因馮客的書寫而被世人所記憶。

"Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful meshing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikötter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing', this is the final volume of 'The People's Trilogy', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine.

'The seminal English language work on the subject' Sunday Times

'A major contribution to scholarship on modern China, one that is unequalled, certainly in the English language ... both revealing and rewarding reading – for specialists and non-specialists alike' Literary Review

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.

Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.

When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao's regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikötter casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikötter's extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking 'People's Trilogy' is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People's Republic of China.

A FINANCIAL TIMES HIGHLIGHT FOR 2026

'The most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years' PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed

From renowned, prize-winning historian Frank Dikötter – 'the historian of China' (Spectator) – a commanding new history of China's path to Communism, brought to the people at the barrel of a gun.

The history of modern China has long been portrayed as a tale of Communists fighting in the hills for freedom, gradually gaining popular support by taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Red Dawn Over China reveals how unlikely the Party's victory actually was, had it not been for financial and military support from the Soviet Union.

Established in 1921 under the direct guidance of Moscow, for the best part of a decade the Communist Party left a trail of destruction, besieging towns and plundering the countryside. When the Communists managed to hold territory, they reduced the villagers to a state of servitude, undermining belief in their cause as well as the local economy. By 1936 they had the same popular appeal as an obscure religious sect. A brutal war of occupation by Japan allowed them to survive far behind enemy lines. After Soviet troops invaded Manchuria in 1945 and provided more money and munitions, the Communists at long last prevailed through a pitiless war of attrition, driven by an unflinching will to conquer at all costs.

In this riveting tale told with great narrative verve, Frank Dikötter reveals how thirteen delegates gathered in a dusty room in 1921 ended up raising the red flag over the Forbidden City in 1949, forever altering the course of history for a quarter of humanity and shaping the world as we know it today.

Praise for Frank Dikötter and the People's Trilogy:

'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre
'Gripping and masterful' Simon Sebag Montefiore
'One of the few books that anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century simply must read' New Statesman

From renowned historian Frank Dikötter, a commanding history recasting how communists seized power in China.

In April 1927, soldiers and detectives descended upon the Russian Embassy in Beijing, revolvers drawn. An hour later, they emerged with a trove of documents, some of them partly damaged by Russians who had tried quickly to destroy them. In these singed and soggy papers was proof that Moscow, despite agreeing three years earlier not to “propagate communistic doctrines,” had, in fact, sent what amounts to millions in today's dollars, along with shiploads of arms and advisors to support nothing less than a revolution in China.

These findings are hardly ever mentioned by historians-until now. The history of modern China has long been framed as an organic enterprise, wherein Communists mobilized the “peasants,” took land from the rich and redistributed it to the poor. Drawing on the Beijing raid as well as several other overlooked archives, Red Star Over China reveals how unlikely a communist victory actually was, had it not been for massive financial and military support from the Soviet Union; a brutal war of occupation by Japan; severe miscalculations by the United States; and-most of all-the Party's unflinching will to conquer at all costs. Frank Dikötter reveals how what began in 1921 with thirteen delegates in a dusty room led to a red flag being raised over the Forbidden City in 1949, forever altering the course of history for a quarter of humanity and shaping the global balance of power as we know it today.