Lawfare Daily: Frank Dikötter on the Early Years of Chinese Communism

[Intro]

Frank Dikötter: Everything is scripted in the, in great detail. Yet the most interesting thing is that behind that facade from 1942 to roughly 43, 44, extraordinarily violent purges took place in that very same place.

Michael Feinberg: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg, here today with Professor Frank Dikötter, who is the Milias senior fellow at the Hoover Institute out of Stanford University and also chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong.

Frank Dikötter: The danger really is that so often with within communist systems, the people within these dictatorships and observers outside occasionally tend to believe that.

The next leader, the next leader will be more humane. It's the next one will be great.

Michael Feinberg: Today we are discussing his new book, “Red Dawn Over China,” which describes the early years of the Chinese Communist movement and how it eventually exercised a stranglehold on the history and society of China.

[Main Podcast]

I don't wanna start with the book itself or any specifics of your narrative just yet, I wanna begin by observing something I've noted in reviews of the book, and these are admittedly coming from more journalistic leaning outlets rather than academic ones. But there seems to be a good amount of surprise at the level of violence your book describes.

And it's interesting to me as somebody who used to work in governments that people didn't expect this, given the era you're covering, given the global region and given the personages involved, and I think that this unpreparedness for the malevolence and violence which occurred in the early years, the Chinese Communist Party consolidation of power can largely be traced to a historiographical problem.

And I think that's reflected either implicitly or explicitly in the title of your book. And so I'm gonna start by asking you to talk for a few moments about somebody else's work. Your work is called “Red Dawn Over China.” There is a much earlier book by a journalist named Edgar Snow called “Red Star Over China.”

And I think your book really provides a necessary corrective to his arguments and his portrayals, and so I was wondering if you could sort of set the scene of your own work by discussing his.

Frank Dikötter: Yes, so, so Edgar Snow, “Red Star Over China,” I was an undergraduate student at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in the early 1980s.

And only very recently did I realize that he and this family only lived a few streets away from me. I may even have crossed paths with his daughter who was doing Spanish as I was doing Chinese and Russian at university. But anyway, I read the book like so many other others and of course it was an introduction to not only Mao Zedong but of course to China and communism and at heart, of course ,a gripping tale, but it's a fantasy.

It goes Snow, naive journalist from Missouri invited to visit the communists in 1936. 1936 is the end of what Mao and subsequently others refer to as the long march, which in essence is a long defeats as they try to escape from the clutches of the troops of the central government and are a mere 6, 7, 8,000 to arrive somewhere far away in the northeast, close to the Soviet border.

At this point in time, there are about 40,000 followers of communism in China, a country of half a billion people. In other words, it doesn't represent very much at all. So Edgar Snow comes to the rescue, so to speak, by becoming their mouthpiece and tells the tale as the communist would like it to be presented to the world.

The sort of a tale of David and Goliath, the communist fighting the good fight. Fight more in tune with the spirit of the modern age, trying to liberate hundreds of millions of people from the bonds of feudalism, imperialism, militarism, fascism all possible evils that you could imagine.

So the Edgar Snow publishes this book a year later, ‘36, ‘37, I believe, translated in many languages and puts Mao on the map and provides them with this great narrative. And I think that has very much shaped the way we understand it, of course, it becomes the official narrative from 1949 onwards as the communists do manage to conquer a quarter of humanity, and the red flag goes up over the Forbidden City in Beijing, becomes the official storyline to this very day with a few modifications here and there.

But it's a story of liberation. And of course it, it's a great story. But once you start looking at the evidence of which there has always been a great amount, I should say, then you realize that it's not quite “red star over China.” It's something very different altogether. And there are two things which I think are very striking, even without starting to dig into all the material that was left behind by the communists themselves, and of course others who were interested in them. And the archives of the Kuomintang, the British, the French also have numerous reports that can help you trace the stories, so to speak.

But the two things really are—First of all, as I already pointed out that 15 years after the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in China, so 1921 this summer, they're established with help of the Soviet Union, the common town, communist international sense agents who help 12 chaps in a room establish a party that represents just over 50 people. That's 1921.

By ‘36, there are about 40,000 followers. So the first thing that's very clear is that they have very little appeal. You just have to look at the numbers. You can go on and on and talk about justice and feudalism and imperialism and oppression of peasants, quote unquote but clearly they have zero impact on any of these issues, whether they are real or not.

And then the second point is if you start looking at the history a bit more in detail, then you realize it, it is a trail of violence that they leave behind. And the chairman, good old Chairman Mao, says it himself. He does have a talent for catchy phrases. And one of them is revolution is not a dinner party.

And the other one is power comes at the barrel of a gun and that's indeed what it is. Now, this shouldn't really come as a surprise. Every revolution, by definition, wishes to overthrow the old order and can only do so through violence. Violence is something that may or may not upset you and your listeners, certainly is not something that I cherish at all. I'd rather have reform at the ballot box if possible. And through laws.

But of course there is a large section of the population who wishes to change things through violence. And that is the communist cause. The communists are convinced that they're surrounded by groups so powerful that you must break their hold on society in order to establish a better utopian society.

So the result is violence. So I gave you two sayings by Mao: Power comes at the barrel of a gun. Revolution is not dinner party. There's another one that dates from the 5th of January 1930, and that is “a single spark will ignite the prairie.” A single spark will ignite the prairie. What does it mean?

It means that, in his imagination, there are hundreds of millions of impoverished peasants in China who are merely waiting to somehow rise and help the communist party gain power. All that is needed is just that single spark that will create that revolution. And how do you create that spark?

You must eliminate the fear that they have by slaughtering, killing power holders. So if you could just seize, for instance a town, a city, and create your revolutionary base there, then that revolution will somehow expand to the rest of the country and lead to victory. So time and again from 1921 to ‘36 the communists, try to seize a town, attack a city, hold onto territory, and eliminate what they consider to be power holders through violence and it fails every single time.

So to me, what is most remarkable? It is not so much the violence, it is the reaction of not just some of the reviewers and readers, but of the hist graphical field as a whole. I mean, why does it come as such a surprise?

Lenin and Stalin were violent. Mussolini who was inspired by Lenin. Lenin of course, was the idea that there must be a revolution not from below, but from above by seizing power you impose the revolution from above. You're not going to sit and wait for the masses to rise. You're not go going to wait for that spark.

You must create that spark. So, Mussolini is inspired by the fascist of violent Hitler, in turn, 1933 inspired by Mussolini. There's a whole string of people who are inspired by it. And the basic principle is violence. So think, you know, shining path in Peru. That's what we are really dealing with and is astonishing the extent to which historiography has been able to somehow, you know, tiptoe around it.

Michael Feinberg: And I do wanna come back to this theme because I think the limitations of the historiography prior to your book had an outsize influence on American policy towards China from essentially World War II. If not through today, at least through the era of trying to bring China into the World Trade Organization and get it to open up economically.

But I do wanna delve a little bit more into your book first, and I wanna sort of just ask you how it is that you came to write this, because you're incredibly well known—the way I first came across you was of, incredibly well received trilogy on the Revolution/Civil War, and the two most apical events that came after it, the famine and the cultural revolution.

And then you wrote a book about the aftereffects of Mao's death, but this time you backpedal and go back in time. And I'm curious. Why you decided to do that now rather than continuing the story forward?

Frank Dikötter: Yes, well, there's an intellectual reason, but most of all, there is a sheer pragmatic reason. And so if you work as a historian, I think it's good to bear in mind that you must be pragmatic in particular when you work on difficult countries like, like China, nevermind North Korea or Russia for that matter in the sense that you must have access to good resources to answer whatever great ideas you may have.

You may have a great idea, but if you can't find the evidence, you know, you cannot have an evidence based approach. And I think that is actually one of the key issues of historiography about China. That country has been closed, was closed for decades after 1949, and so many historians were attracted to theories and ideas, rather than to facts and evidence because so little of it was available.

So what was what was the idea? Well, it occurred to me you know, this may come as a surprise because it's a pretty straightforward sort of observation, but it occurred to me that if in China from ‘58 to ‘62, quite literally, tens of millions of people were starved, neglected, sometimes beaten to death with an economy that was a, an absolute catastrophe, during the Great Leap Forward, ‘58, ‘62, it occurred to me if these people couldn't run an economy after 1949, and the chances were that they couldn't do that. Before 1949, although there thought, what did they actually do as opposed to what did they think?

'cause so much of the histography is about what they were thinking what the policies are as opposed to what they actually did. So that was number one. But then how do you find out what they did? So the idea came during COVID. I wasn't in Hong Kong. Of course, I wanted to cross the border, but we're all closed down.

Couldn't cross that border. Stuck in Hong Kong for over a year really. It occurred to me that there were in the library books that had been smuggled across the border that had been printed in Beijing in the 1980s for internal consumption only, or you know, in Chinese it's called nèibù.

It means that they were not printed to be sold, to be put in libraries for the greater public. They were really for the eyes of top officials only printed in very limited numbers. And these volumes really were collections of archives that had been compiled by the central archives in Beijing, in collaboration with provincial archives.

So in short, there were about 250 to 300 volumes, which assembled every scrap, every ever written by any communist. From roughly the early 1920s to roughly 1948, ‘49, an enormous amount of material. I can't say I read all of it. I had students work with me on it. And that really constituted the sort of foundation for it.

And I thought with that material, plus of course other material from the French archives, from the KMT, the Kuomindang, the central government that went to Taiwan after 1949, there was enough that to really start looking at it from a much more critical angle. So, so the trick was to find enough evidence to really tackle a fairy tale.

Michael Feinberg: This is interesting. You mentioned Hitler, you mentioned Stalin and Lenin. You mentioned Mussolini, or I apologize, you didn’t mention Stalin. You mentioned Lenin only, but you did mention Mussolini and some of the authoritarian movements that were roughly contemporaneous, if not a little bit before in Europe, and it brings up in almost pop culture puzzle to me.

I have a lot of friends whose families immigrated from the mainland, or went to Taiwan and then the United States largely because of events like the Cultural Revolution. In other words, they were what we would today describe as political refugees, and even they, who have, if not firsthand, familial knowledge of the suffering and violence that occurred under Mao—

Still treat Mao as almost this kitschy figure, and I'm not immune to it either. I remember when I first started working the Chinese problem set with the FBI. I took great pride in this cigarette lighter somebody had given me that had Mao emblazoned on it. And when you opened it, it played in cheap electronic tones “The Sun Shines East.”

Now Mao is responsible for more deaths than Hitler. He's responsible for more deaths than Mussolini. He's responsible for more deaths than Lenin and Stalin combined, and we would never in a million years have images of any of those individuals among our pocket litter, or our everyday carry tools.

Why is it that among the general populace, at least among those who have not looked into archives or had to deal with Ccmmunist party policies, why does Mao get a pass? Where other dictators do not.

Frank Dikötter: Yeah. I think this is an extraordinarily interesting question, and it's a very difficult one because we're talking really about, well, well, first of all, human beings.

I mean, why do people react like that when it comes to Mao and then when it comes to two broad groups you mentioned, one is in his victims of the Cultural Revolution from China and then outsiders. So when it comes to the victims, of course there's always the good old story that, you know, the emperor, the king's good, his servants are wickeds.

It's an old tale, dates from the middle Ages. You will find it everywhere and with every dictator. If only Stalin knew. Now if only Mussolini knew what kind of horrors are being perpetrated by his fascist followers on the ground,

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. I think it actually starts with his Czar Alexander, and the trope is, if only the czar knew how his surfs were being treated by the landowners, this would never go on.

Frank Dikötter: Yes, so, so that, that's of course a powerful universal sort of myth that the man at the very top is simply doesn't know, and you hear this quite a lot, that the chairman simply didn't realize what was happening. Of course, he knew perfectly what, well, he had, he was the head of an extraordinary, sophisticated information system and he instigated most of it.

But the other point really is why nonetheless, Mao abroad, among people who should know better, gets a pass. Now, to be fair to the other dictators, China is a big country. So the base, you know, we're talking really about a country that is the size of Europe. It's an absolutely massive country.

So if you merely mess with about 5%, that is a great number of people. That's a great number of people. And also to be fair, I have seen once in my 20 years in Hong Kong, I did see what looked to me like a local chap walk around with a Hitler t-shirt. But this only happened once. So I can't say that is something one does see very often.

But as you pointed out, there are plenty of Mao paraphernalia and t-shirts and caps and what have you not, there are reasonably well-known academics in Europe and possibly even the United States who do Chinese studies and who will appear to speak in public in what is roughly referred refer to as the, you know, the Mao jackets.

So why I think it, it boils down at least as far as Europe and the United States is concerned. I think it boils down to something reasonably straightforward, and that is that so many others find it difficult to believe that Chinese communism is communism. A Chinese communism is communism. The idea of Chinese communism is not really communism.

Now, that's the other, it's something else that really, democrats waiting to emerge. There are agrarian reformers. There are people who are concerned about the wealth for the majority. There are those who really wish to tackle bureaucracy or neoliberalism or capitalism or whatever evils we think that might exist or that the other side of the world, and they provide a powerful alternative to what it is that we do not like.

So I think that's actually one of the key issues. So it's a mistake that a great many of us make, not least, of course, leaders of a variety of countries not least the United States of America. As you know, and I point this out in the book, during the Second World War, Americans began to believe that the Communist Stalin was the one who told them in the first place.

You'll remember, I, I mentioned the Communist International, Stalin abolished it in 1943 to make sure that the communist parties elsewhere did not look like mere puppets installed by Moscow. He said, you, he told those parties you must look genuine. And he told the Americans, they are margarine communists, margarine communists.

They said, these are not real communists. They have nothing to do with us. And the Americans bought it and portrayed them as agrarian reformers. People who really should be integrated included in any government that China wanted to have after the end of the Second World War, 1945. Now, of course, with the civil war, once the flag goes up, the red flag goes up.

The Americans have to fight them in Korea still. They didn't learn the lesson. Kissinger, Nixon—with China, 1971, ‘72 Kissinger comes up with the idea that somehow the Chinese communists are not really communists. They are Confucian. There's a Confucian past Confucius—The great ancient sage is the one who really guides the way they think that culture, society, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, we know what that led and then it goes on and on. It was the same with. Bush after the Chinaman massacre on the 4th of June, 1989. And of course, bill Clinton and so many others who told us that if only China could become a member of the WTO, then they would become responsible stakeholders, participants in the international.

Although with economic reform, gradually democratic reform would also emerge they would become participants in a much greater liberal order. Well, that didn't quite work out, did it?

Michael Feinberg: You hit the nail on the head. There is this very pan gloss and strain of viewing China as a democracy and waiting, or as a liberal socialist republic in waiting that I think, I don't think I'm being inappropriate by saying this, it infects American policy.

From the earliest days forward, and it's interesting because I read your books. I think as they were coming out I forget what year the Tragedy of Liberation was published, but before it, I had read Barbara Tuchman Stillwell and the “American Experience in China.” I had read EJ Kahn's, “The China Hands,” which deals very much with John's service.

And you talk a lot, or not a lot, but considerable ink is expended on both. General Joseph Stilwell and the Foreign Service Officer, John Service, and earlier portrayals of them were very laudatory. For the most part. They were viewed almost in this orientalist fashion as sort of latter day Richard Burtons who had gone to this foreign land and been able to pierce the veil and really understand this foreign society, which was now of importance to the United States and they were harshly defamed by anti-communist crusaders later on in their lives.

And the way they were treated was a tragedy. But I think we can now with the archival work that we have in large part due to scholars like yourself say that the way they were treated later may have been inappropriate. But the best that can be said about them is that they were wholly naive in dealing with the early Chinese communists, if not in one of their cases, an outright co-opt.

Frank Dikötter: Yeah I'll start with the John Service. 'cause the interesting thing is that you know, I'm not the first one to write about them. I should say that I'm probably the first one to write about, you know, a number of aspects of the rise, if that's the term of communism in China. So the, our books that have been written about, you know, aspects of these two.

The interesting thing is that I do mention in the book something I haven't seen elsewhere. Jonathan Mirsky was a great journalist, actually phoned John Service when he was in a retirement home, and actually John Service wanted to get something off his chest before he died. He died a few years later when asked whether he had betrayed the central government, the KMT, hesaid yes. He had actually given the order of battle to a spy linked to, to, to Richard Sorge and the whole the whole Moscow spying network. So, yes. That was not being merely naive, that was really trading in secrets. Right.

And then when it comes to Stilwell, the interesting thing is that if you actually read his early reports, 'cause we always talk about Stilwell from roughly ‘40, ‘41, ‘42, ‘43 onwards. But he was there during the late thirties as a military attache and his reports, although the tone is somewhat peculiar. He has his own particular cynical way of looking at China, which later on becomes straightforward, I think pretty much racist towards Chiang Kai-Shek. But nonetheless, what I'm trying to say is that he was a pretty astute observer and he himself says—

In 1936 that Chiang Kai-Shek who he will later despise that Chiang Kai-Shek had been able to bring a measure of unity to the Republic of China without violence that had never been realized before. So it was actually quite complimentary in 1936. Of course, the tone changes a few years later.

But in a nutshell, both are convinced that Chiang Kai-Shek and the Republic of China, Free China that's what it's called, it's an internationally recognized government that represents hundreds of millions, is basically rotten to the core and the communists, who neither of them have actually seen or visited 'cause they are Yan'an and the communist capital in Northeast, which is pretty much closed until about ‘43 when the first Americans start arriving.

Very carefully selected Americans, so there, there are free to visit free China and criticized it as they wish, although on the other hand, they've never set foot in Yan'an yet praise it. Praise it to the sky. So once the Americans start arriving carefully, select a journalist from ‘43 ‘44 onwards, what they are shown is, of course, a showcase as in any communist regime, Bernard Shaw, the playwright of course went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and as a playwright, did not quite realize that what was put up for him was a great play by Stalin. It's the same with Yan'an that means model schools, model farms and model prisoners, model farmers, you know, who sing songs and appear to be happy.

Just one giant show. So some of the archives go into great detail that they'll tell you, but some of the prop, the propaganda team will go back and tell off farmers who fail to look up and greet the Americans as they drive past in the bus on the way to Yan'an. And they go so far as to say, ah, this village locked up dogs.

And that makes it look unnatural. So everything is scripted in the, in great detail. Yet the most interesting thing is that behind that facade from 1942 to roughly ‘43, ‘44. Extraordinarily violent purges took place in that very same place with some 15,000, if not more. People who had to go through, through the ringer, you know, tortured, occasionally purged, some of them shot.

Or disposed of in, in other ways, very violent and purges from which Mao really emerges as the key central leader. So, great contrast between public image presented to outsiders and the inner, the workings of the party.

Michael Feinberg: So I guess this is a more philosophical question, but it's one that we have often applied to other nations that have gone down a sort of tyrannical path.

A.J.P. Taylor did it famously with Germany when he wrote the course of German history in which he argues essentially the road to Hitler and the Holocaust begins with Otto Von Bismarck's Wars of German unification. It is a very ish interpretation of history, but it does make me ask.

Given how Mao started and given the tenor in tone of the Communist Party's early takeover, do you think the—excesses is too weak award. Do you think the tragedies and the terrors of the cultural revolution and the great famine and even the depredations under the Gang of Four later, are these to a certain extent baked in to how the Communist Party originally takes power? Are these inevitable or is there an off ramp at some point that gets missed?

Frank Dikötter: It's an incredibly difficult question. First, I want to really point out something I said earlier on. I want to reemphasize it. There's very little in the 1920s and 30s in China, there's very little appeal of communism in China.

Let me put it that way. The far greater people in any European country who find communism interesting than in China. So it is a minor philosophy, it's a minor political movement. Had it not been for the Japanese in 1937, when the Second World War really starts in Asia, had it not been for the Japanese, and then subsequently the arrival of 1,000,000 soldiers sent by Stalin who crossed the border into Manchuria in 1945. Had it not been for those two, ’37 to ‘45, communism would never have had any appeal. At all. So it's really minor. So that's point number one.

But the broader question really is about the sort of DNA. Is there something in the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party? I would say there's something in the DNA of any philosophy that wishes to have or to pursue or to maintain a monopoly of power. I go a bit further. I would say you, you could really subdivide the history of humanity of the last two, three centuries into two trends.

Those who, against all odds believe that power must be restrained. That there must be a separation of powers. It starts, of course, with the French philosopher Montesquieu, if not before, with checks and balances and freedom of expression and opposition parties, and you name it, you're familiar with it. And those who believe that system is either manipulated or is weak or will not work, and that there must be a monopoly over power.

So these are antagonistic philosophies, and they are the two philosophies that play out throughout the 19th and 20th century, in fact, to this very day. In other words, democracy versus dictatorship. Now, once you have a monopoly over power without much constraint is inevitable that there would be great abusers.

I mean, the greater the power, the greater the abuse. So to that extent, yes, it's, it is very much part of the DNA of any communist party. But then of course. It varies enormously. The number of people who to today are put to death in the People's Republic of China. And of course, nothing compared to the 1980s, which was nothing compared to the 1960s, et cetera, et cetera.

So communist parties do change over time. I think what you do see overall is that thresholds of tolerance do change over time. That it, that even communists can no longer get away with what they were doing, say 20 years ago, 40 years ago, or 60 years ago. So in that sense, of course, one party states do change, but then again, there's no guarantee. There's no guarantee.

Michael Feinberg: And it's interesting because the tension you talk about between democracies and dictatorships, it's not just between different political tribes. We see it play out in miniature with an individual, intellectual movements. And I'm gonna talk about France for a second, but I promise it is to set up a question about China.

The dichotomy you were describing made me instantly think about the sort of intellectual fuselages between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, where Sartre is, I don't think I'm overstating the case to call him a Marxist or even a Stalinist apologist, whereas Camus, particularly in the rebel, takes a much more humanistic view to push back against that, and it ends up destroying their friendship and.

We see a, almost like a kabuki version of this. I know I'm mixing Asian countries but we see a play acting version of this in the period after your book concludes where Zhou Enlai is sort of popularly thought to be a moderating force on mob. And we know now that probably was not true, but at least within China, there is this myth that there were individuals within the Communist Party who tried to push back and temper the more aggressive dictatorial impulses of mouth.

And I said, I think that's a myth to a large extent. And my question is there anybody within the Communist party for whom it's not a myth? Do they ever produce somebody like France produced in Camus or—who is part of the culture, but uncomfortable and willing to push back against it? Yeah,

Frank Dikötter: Well, the simple answers of I'm a great admir, Albert Camus and—of course, and I'm not a great fan of where I read in in high school, in university nevermind—

But the key point is, of course, they were. They were free to express their opinions in France, whereas in China after ‘49, 1 is not free to express one's opinions. So whatever opposition there may have been, would've been underground. So if it, within the ranks of the party, as you pointed out, was this idea somehow that Zhou Enlai pushed back, and occasionally he, he did, but he was just as ruthless as many others.

It's just that he pursued very different goals. So he's well known in the 1920s and 30s. So having ordered the execution, not only of communist party members who betrayed the cause, but their entire families and relatives has happened with the master spy, Master Jiang when he was apprehended in Shanghai in the early 1930s. So I think a dozen family members were buried face down, which is not exactly something that, you know, is is seen as respectful of a body in Chinese culture. Zhou Enlai during the cultural revolution, had his own sort of witch hunt against anyone who would criticize him in the past.

And they all used the culture revolution to get rid of the real or imaginary enemies. But the point really must be that when you read through the archives, what is so extraordinarily interesting is that there are so many just ordinary people who despite the odds, despite the tyranny, despite the purges, despite the fear, despite the, you know, the terror the knock on the door in the middle of the night are just so stubborn. This refuse to let go.

To the extent that sometimes you despair, you think why are they? There's this woman who studies German culture during the Cultural Revolution and she writes to Mao to say that all these red guards who come to parade in front of him on Tiananmen Square. That it reminds her of the Nazi parades under Adolf Hitler.

That's what she writes. I mean, extraordinarily courageous. And she must have known that when she sent that letter off she, she would end up in prison, as of course she does. And there's so many ordinary individuals like that. It's quite extraordinary. So the question really is, are there any who managed to go all the way to the top, so to speak?

You know, people who might keep the cards very close to their chest and somehow see what the issues are and try to put for a sort of more humane communism if there's such a thing.

I think they do exist. They're very rare. But the Hoover Institution has the diary of an extraordinary man called Li Rui who really joined the calls at a very early stage and went all the way ‘49 under was all the way through the Republic of the People's Republic be became a secretary of Mao, was purged in 1959 for speaking out against the famine was rehabilitated some 20 years later, went quite high up in the state organization, but nonetheless, caps absolute faith that somehow there had to be separation of powers.

So you can find a few individuals who realize that a monopoly over power is the root cause of all these issues that appear time and again. And he's one of the, one of the few who really sees it. But of course he doesn't go all the way to the top. He's silenced again. But they do exist. They do exist.

I think the danger really is that so often with. Within communist systems, the people within these dictatorships and observers outside occasionally tend to believe that the next leader will be more humane. It's the next one will be great. You know, here is Mao. The moment he dies will, well Deng Xiaoping will be our savior until he sends in.

Some 200 tanks and a hundred thousand soldiers to to crush unarmed civilians in Beijing in 1989, Deng Xiaoping will be our savior. I remember Xi Jinping coming to Hong Kong before 20 12. And yeah, he looked like a harmless man a reformer. You know, he might be the one they never are.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. I will confess my view of Marxism in turn, in practice, to put it politely, is skeptical. And it's interesting you talk about how communism never really takes hold as a mass movement per se, in China.

And it's interesting because if you actually, and I realize we're getting a bit far afield of China here, but if you actually look at the nations that do have communist revolutions, none of them are the ones either in name or in characteristic that were originally predicted by Marxian analysis as where it would take place. None of them are industrialized. None of them have mass labor movements. Most of them are very poor, agrarian. Or if not agrarian societies, societies where a large portion of the population is not living a mechanized lifestyle.

And I think that's what's so interesting to me and why I'm fascinated by the period covered by your book is if you had told somebody when Marx first started publishing his works, take your pick. Whether we're talking about the manifesto or his works with capital, if you had predicted at the end of the 19th century or even a little bit earlier that the longest lasting communist regime would be in China, people would look at you like you were insane.

Frank Dikötter: Yeah, that's it. It's very true. And not only that, but of course with all due respect to the populations involved, I somehow doubt that after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, all the conquest of power by Communists in China in ‘49, all under Pol Pot, under Khmer Rouge in Cambodia the majority of the population were really interested in following the tenets of dialectical materialism.

Michael Feinberg: No, I think they were largely interested in staying off the radar and Yes, exactly. Avoiding the attention of those who had taken power—

Frank Dikötter: To the point where these regimes invariably have to come up with something else, which is generally a cult of personality.

Michael Feinberg: Yes. Which we saw very much happen with Mao, and we are very much seeing it now. I think with Xi Jinping, to a degree we have not in the post-Cultural Revolution era?

Frank Dikötter: Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, there is of course always something about, you know, the leader, since the leader represents the general will and must make, I mean, this is the irony of all communist parties.

That must be one person ultimately who makes the decisions for the greater good. And party discipline means that once that decision has been taken, all orders must follow. But nonetheless the cult of personality on the Mao was called something quite extraordinary and has reappeared with Xi Jinping.

There's absolutely no doubt about it. To a great extent. I think that China today is something that is looking forwards. If I may phrase it like this may sound rather paradoxical, but it's looking forward to North Korea. It sees North Korea as a sort of a model. Well, North Korea being a much smaller, much easier to control.

So North Korea with an economy that works better.

Michael Feinberg: So we've talked about Xi Jinping, we've talked about Mao, we've talked about Zhou Enlai, and. These are names that are familiar to most people.

For our last topic of discussion, I wanna point out that your book contains an enormous cast of characters, many of whom are not well known to, not just popular audiences, but even people like myself who worked in the world of sinology, not as historians, as practitioners of other things, but there were dozens upon dozens of names with which I was not previously familiar. And I wanted to just ask in closing, who do you think are the really underrated players in this saga that deserve more attention from future generations of historians?

Frank Dikötter: Oh, that's a really difficult question. So first I apologize, because I always tried to keep the names to a minimum. I was, I realized that there's such a great cast of characters you have to try to boil it down to, you know—

Michael Feinberg: Oh, I meant my statement as a compliment, not a criticism.

Frank Dikötter: I realize that I realize it's not a criticism but nonetheless, there was so more, so many more names that I didn't mention.

So I tried to keep some sort of, you know, check on the number of names that I mentioned. But the point really is that with the sort of standard history that we have had to read about China and Mao, Mao's the central figure, Mao appears out of nowhere. He is the key figure. And of course all the others are minor people in that.

The one name who is reasonably well known, but not in a study this Peng Pai. So Peng Pai is the one who, well before Mao we're talking about 1927 to ‘28, establishes a Soviet along the coast north of Hong Kong, not too far away from here, and really has an absolutely ferocious reign of terror in which he really forces local people to take stabs quite literally with a knife at people den now as class enemies, where he points out time and again, it is better to kill one hundreds.

A hundred innocents then have, you know, a reactionary survive where he points out that if we don't kill them, they will kill us, which is sort of extraordinary red brain, drenched in blood that it really, if you don't understand that, then I think is very difficult to understand the rest of communism in China.

But then there's so many other characters in there. I would say my gut reaction would actually be the Russians, and not just the Russians. I'm Dutch. But you know, when I mentioned the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, it would never have happened without an envoy sent by Lenin called Hank Snavely in 1921.

So this man was Dutch, commandant agent, had experience of organizing workers and strikers in Indonesia and he was the one who managed to get 12 quite cantankerous members who couldn't agree on anything into a room to establish the Communist Party of China. And these 12 people represented some 50 odd other people strewn throughout huge country. So Hank Snavely and of course, Micha Boin who's the man who against all odds, commands a major army of about a quarter of a million people by 1926, and rules of a vast part of China that a Soviet could have gone that far as quite extraordinary.

So we tend to underestimate the role that the Soviets have played, and that of course is also the history of communism, is that without Lenin and Stalin, they would not have been a Mao, but of course the Chinese are very keen to erase them from history. Then in turn, Mao helps Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Not to mention Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, but the Vietnamese test Chinese very keen not to mention this help at all and, and on. It goals, not to mention the disputes between the Vietnamese and the—for, so the Soviets played an absolutely huge role, and to me, the key person who has been extremely well studied, but the peers on, I think no less than 68 pages in this book is Stalin.

It is Stalin who makes so many of the major decisions who so often comes to rescue the Communist Party when it is on the verge of just vanishing into nothing nothingness. In 1936, at the end of the long march, it is Stalin who says, stop fighting Chiang Kai-Shek and the central government create a united front and fight.

Those that everyone in China is dying to fight, namely the Japanese, and it still takes six months for the penny to drop. For now to think, oh, that's actually a good idea. This is a country that is keen to fight Japan, yet all the communists can do has gone about the fascism of Chiang Kai-Shek. And you know how the central government is propped up by imperialist powers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, without any sort of popular resonance whatsoever.

It is Stalin, comes up with the united front. It is Stalin who tells Mao by the end of 1938, ‘39, to get rid of the number of people. That Stalin himself sent in the first place and the Stalin, who in 1943 tells Mao, your Marxism, we have abolished the Communist International. You must adapt your communist party to local conditions.

That is Stalin who does that

Michael Feinberg: And it's interesting because this isn't just a lacuna. In Chinese history, if you look at the major biographies of Stalin, whether Robert Conquest, Simon Seabag, Montefore, this is not a relationship that gets many pages. We'll see if Stephen Kotkin corrects it in his forthcoming third volume on Stalin, but perhaps that's a good place to leave it today before we weigh too much into Soviet history at the expense of Chinese.

So Professor Dikötter, thank you very much for joining us today. This has been an incredibly illuminating conversation, and I look forward to whatever archival research of yours comes next.

Frank Dikötter: Thank you.

[Outro]

Michael Feinberg: The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you wanna support the show and listen ad-free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter at lawfaremedia.org/support. Supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help.

And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja with audio engineering by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from ALIBI Music.

And as always, thanks for listening.