The 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China was not a birthday I felt like celebrating. As Dutch historian Frank Dikötter has shown in his searing three-volume history of the Mao era, the Communist regime claimed the lives of tens of millions of people: 2 million in the revolution between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of the 1950s, up to 45 million in the man-made famine known as the “Great Leap Forward,” and yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s campaign against the intelligentsia, which escalated into a civil war.