Frank Dikötter

Expertise

• China
• Communism
• Contemporary History
• Discrimination
• Drug Control

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  Frank Dikötter

  Milias Senior Fellow

  Short Bio

  Frank Dikötter is the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the most widely read living historian of modern China, with books translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of The People’s Trilogy, which includes Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).

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  Frank Dikötter is the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the most widely read living historian of modern China, with books translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of The People’s Trilogy, which includes Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).

  Born in the Netherlands, Dikötter was educated in Switzerland and graduated from the University of Geneva in 1985 with honors in history and Russian. He then spent two years in the People’s Republic of China and three years later obtained a PhD in history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He published a revised version of his dissertation as The Discourse of Race in Modern China with Stanford University Press (1992). He spent close to twenty years as professor of the modern history of China at SOAS, recasting the history of Republican China in a series of five research monographs that culminated in the long essay China before Mao: The Age of Openness (2005).

  In 2006, Dikötter moved to Asia to join the University of Hong Kong. There he was the first_—and apparently only—foreigner to systematically use a whole range of archives of the Communist Party of China, using thousands of files to document the fate of ordinary people under Mao in The People’s Trilogy. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe covered a man-made disaster that led to the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. In 2011 the book obtained the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, Britain's most prestigious literary award. It was followed by The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957 and The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976.

  Dikötter’s other books include How to be a Dictator (2019), with chapters on eight dictators from Mussolini to Mengistu, China after Mao (2022), a sequel to the trilogy, which showed how the forty years known as “Reform and Opening Up” from 1978 onwards were instead a concerted effort to reinforce the party's monopoly over power and its control over the commanding heights of the economy, in explicitly Marxist-Leninist fashion.

  Dikötter joined the Hoover Institution as adjunct in 2017 and was named Milias Senior Fellow on a full-time basis in 2025. He has an honorary doctorate from Leiden University.

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