What drives Frank Dikötter, chronicler of China’s insanity?
Hong Kong scholar leaves few horrors untold in his books on modern China, the latest of which, covering the Cultural Revolution, has just been published. He talks to Fionnuala McHugh about empathy, torture-porn and how history repeats itself
The first line in the preface to Mao’s Great Famine, by Frank Dikötter, states: Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. He then goes on to describe it. By page 33, in the 420-page paperback edition, villagers in Gansu province are already referring to rural water-conservancy projects as “the killing fields”. That term is usually associated with the activities of the Khmer Rouge in mid-1970s Cambodia; but, years earlier, millions of people were dying in China’s countryside and cities.
Death came in various guises. Apart from straightforward starvation, there were accidents as exhausted novices grappled with the mechanics of the Great Leap Forward, inadvertent poisonings in collectivised canteens, beatings, hangings, burials of those still living and many, many suicides. Nor was death necessarily the end. Occasionally, corpses were dug up and eaten. In July 1962, Liu Shaoqi, China’s head of state, summoned Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party chairman, to Beijing.
“So many people have died of hunger!” Liu told him and, he added, “History will judge you and me – even cannibalism will go into the books!” For Dikötter (whose book has, indeed, a chapter titled “Cannibalism”), it was the defining moment not of the famine – the Great Leap Forward had begun petering out early in 1962, after the deaths of at least 45 million people – but of Mao’s decision to get rid of Liu. That desire would trigger further mayhem.
Book review: The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikotter
The final words of Mao’s Great Famine, a book that went on to win the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, are: “Mao was biding his time, but the patient groundwork for launching a Cultural Revolution that would tear the party and the country apart had already begun.”
Dikötter’s second volume, in what would turn out to be a trilogy on modern China, didn’t look ahead, however, but back. In The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957, the new China under Mao’s leadership begins, as it clearly means to go on, with brutality, starvation, torture, beatings, suicides. Death quotas are handed down, inhumanity is rampant, millions suffer. That book was shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize.
