Frank Dikötter and the True History of Communist China

- Even if you think you understand the history of modern China, this show may make you think again. Historian Frank Dikotter on "Uncommon Knowledge" now. Welcome to "Uncommon Knowledge." I'm Peter Robinson. A native of the Netherlands, Frank Dikotter taught for some two decades at the University of Hong Kong before becoming a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution just last year. Frank's three-book study of China under Mao, "The People's Trilogy" has become a classic of Chinese history. And now Professor Dikotter has published a book that represents a kind of prequel, a history of the communists' rise to power, "Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity." Frank, welcome back to "Uncommon Knowledge."

- Thank you for having me.

- Frank, we'll get to your book, we'll talk a lot about your book, but I wanna start with an earlier book that in many ways you are responding to yourself throughout your book. This is the 1935 work, "Red Star Over China" by the American journalist Edgar Snow. The book that you yourself write, quote, "became the basis for all subsequent accounts of the rise of the Communist Party," close quote. Now, Snow is visiting Mao in Shaanxi which I'm sure I just mispronounced. This is the communist base that they reach after the Long March. He writes here in the passage that I'm about to quote of a conversation that he, Edgar Snow, has with one of the leading communist military figures, Commander P'eng. Quoting Edgar Snow, who is in turn quoting Commander P'eng. "Only by implanting itself deeply in the hearts of the people," Commander P'eng said, "Only by fulfilling the demands of the masses, only by consolidating a base in the peasant soviets, and only by sheltering in the shadow of the masses, can partisan warfare bring revolutionary victory. We are nothing but the fist of the people."

- Great quotation.

- Well, you don't buy a bit of it, do you, Frank?

- No.

- Can you explain the importance briefly, briefly, I wanna get to your work, but explain the importance of Edgar Snow and of that book 1935, which presents this romantic, which you've just heard, this romantic view of the communist effort, why that remains important today.

- Yep. So Edgar Snow has a number of interviews published with Mao in '36, then the book is published in '37, instantly translated into 20 languages, read around the world, turns Mao Zedong into a sort of household name. Before that, who knew about the communists in China? Very few people. And that moment, Edgar Snow, a journalist from Missouri invited by Mao, for very obvious reasons, namely that Edgar Snow is quite sympathetic. Turns out that the book really is a fantastic show piece where the communists tell their story exactly the way they want it to be-

- Totally unchallenged,

- Projected to the world, utterly unchallenged. And Edgar Snow goes along with the whole P'eng thing. He's a mouthpiece, no more than that. By the way, when I was in Switzerland as an undergraduate student, University of Geneva, his family lived about three streets away from me.

- Edgar Snow.

- In Nyon, yes. Yes, absolutely. And his daughter studied modern languages at the university same time as I did. So we may have crossed paths, but the point really is I don't buy it. And it is, in essence, the book, I'd read it as an undergraduate student, thought it was fascinating, but didn't quite believe it. It is the story.

- It is readable, it's a beautiful-

- It's very readable.

- Yes, it's a, right. It is that.

- It's not just readable, it's a great story with heroes and villains.

- Yes, yes.

- It is a David and Goliath story. It is the communists who are fighting for freedom in the hills against the oppressive forces of feudalism, capitalism, fascism. Mao Zedong is the one who will liberate the great masses. The Communist Party is the one that has a modern message of liberation and emancipation in touch with millions, of course, that will drive the Communist Party towards victory.

- And so, now we are nine decades on from the publication of that book. And you argue that in trying to come to grips with the actual facts of Chinese communist history, you still find yourself or anyone who is serious about the actual history of the rise of Mao still finds himself contending with this mood of opinion first established by Edgar Snow. Is that's your argument?

- I would go further. I would say that the book "Red Star Over China" becomes more or less the official party line, which is then, of course, propagated widely after 1949.

- The communists themselves believe it today.

- It is their message to start with. It's their message. Now they might fine tune a thing here or two, and it's a little bit like photographs in the communist regime.

- Photoshopped, right.

- People tend to disappear once in a while. But otherwise, the overall story, it's a quite straightforward story. The Qing dynasty established by the Manchus is corrupt, weak.

- Hold on.

- Invaded.

- We wanna get to that story.

- Okay.

- But I wanna talk to, I'd like to get to that, I wanna get to that. We have to get to it, but in a moment. Because first I wanna talk about your work, which begins with, you write that in the '80s, the Communist Party in China commissioned a massive archival work that produced, I may get this a little bit wrong, but it produced something like 300 volumes, each hundreds of pages of long of archival material, documentary material that dates from 1923 all the way through this period to the end of the Chinese Civil War and the triumph of Mao in 1949.

- Yes.

- You further write that because this is actual history, real documents, the Communist Party has kept it very tightly controlled.

- Yes.

- And yet, Frank Dikotter has worked his way through these documents and given us this new history "Red Dawn Over China." How did you get your paws on the documents?

- Well, that's very easy. You know, you may remember in my earlier work, I would spend enormous amounts of time traveling to party archives in provincial cities, municipal archives, you name it, all over time.

- Frank, could I tell you?

- But not with this.

- So, this is one reason why I love, actually why I love you, but why I love your work.

- Thank you.

- Because your fundamental impulse is not that of an academic in an ivory tower, and as I take the way you've lived your life, Frank, your fundamental impulse is that of a journalist, you want to encounter the primary reality, not reflect upon.

- It is evidence based.

- Okay. All right, all right.

- It's evidence. So this leads to a question, I will answer your question right away, but what kind of evidence have historians used to talk about the modern history of China and the role of the communists in particular? Well, they've used "Red Star Over China" by Edgar Snow, which is a fairytale. There's very little material available except for accounts of a few journalists who may or may not have visited this or that place occupied by the communists. But then after 1949, of course the bamboo curtain comes down and what you can find, whatever kind of material you can find, is very limited. In fact, from '49, for three decades, that country is locked up. No historian, archeologist, economist is going to walk in and find their way to a library, nevermind an archive. So for the best part of about, you know, a good 50, 60 years, historians of modern China have had to rely on material, which was published by the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party after 1949. You know, they had their selection of sources that you can use to propagate their view. So what they did in the 1980s, it's very, very interesting. The central archives controlled by the Central Committee went to local provincial archives to collect very meticulously every bit of paper that was produced by local Communist Party branches from 1923 to '49. And they published them in the 1980s from roughly '81 to '89 as material, which is roughly the sort of equivalent to, it's all copied from the Russians, the Soviets, the sort of the Russians call it. It comes from the where every library has a collection of books which nobody can read, except if you are a leading party member. So these books were not meant to be publicly available, but of course they found their way across the border into Hong Kong.

- Which is where you got, which is where you saw.

- I found them in Hong Kong, it was as simple as that.

- I see. Okay. Now, may I ask one more question?

- Yes, of course.

- Which is, you have produced "Red Dawn Over China" based on your working your way through these documents-

- And others.

- And others, and others. But why haven't these documents, which were produced in the '80s, made their way into Hong Kong, why haven't we seen a flood of new histories of the rise of the communists from '21, I think is when the party is founded to '49, when they take control. Why is it that Frank Dikotter and as best I can tell Frank Dikotter alone is using the original sources?

- A small number of historians have used a volume or two.

- Right.

- But overall, very little of it has been read. So I guess my answer is go and ask them. Also, when it comes to post '49, how come others don't use these archives as extensively as I have? Go and ask them. It is not my problem.

- All right.

- But there is an issue. For instance, these sources are fundamental, but there are sources in Russian, which are also absolutely fundamental. You cannot understand the rise of the Communist Party of China from '21 to '49 if you do not have access to the material that circulated between the Kuomintang established in 1919 and the Communist Party of China in Russian. And you can buy it, you can read it, it's about five volumes, each 1,000 pages. But if you don't read Russian, and quite frankly you shouldn't even try, to do the history of modern China, simply because Stalin appears, I think about, appears on 70 pages in my book. It is Stalin who sets the parameters. It is not Chairman Mao.

- Yes.

- And we'll come to that-

- Yes, yes.

- In a moment.

- We will come to this.

- So without the Russian sources and without the Chinese internally-produced archives, I don't think there's an awful lot you can do.

- So you quote the late China hand, Robert Marquand, I'm not sure how to pronounce it. How is that-

- I have no idea.

- Robert Marquand, who wrote, quote, "While history around the globe has been taken to task." The British have been reexamining colonialist history of the 1619 Project in this country. The west has been reexamining every detail of its past. "While history around the globe has been taken to task, queried, deconstructed, and reconstructed, China's triumphal version of its past 'remains quaintly untouched.'" Enter Frank Dikotter. All right. Here is, I'm going to rush through this. I made notes so that it doesn't take too much of our time. Correct this and mend it as you feel necessary. But I want to provide what I take to be sort of the standard history, first bit of the history of China.

- Sure.

- This is before the war, before the Second World War. So we have the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912. So part one, follow the Qing dynasty in 1912 to the Japanese invasion of 1937. And the narrative goes that under pressure from Western powers weakened by corruption, the Qing dynasty falls, China descends into chaos, fought over by competing warlords, peasants across the nation oppressed, Mao founds the Communist Party in 1923. He champions the people against the warlords and the rich merchants. And the Communist Party begins very small, but steadily, steadily, steadily gains support. By the 1930s, the communists face only one serious rival, the nationalist forces under the fascist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Because Chiang has the support of the West, of course, the capitalists support the fascist, the nationalists support superior weapons and material. The communists escaped the nationalists by going on the historic Long March of 1934 and '35 from Southeastern to Northwestern China, where the communists established the base in Shaanxi, where Edgar Snow interviewed Commander P'eng, where they consolidate power as more and more of the country rallies to the communists and turns against the nationalists. So there we have from the fall of Chiang, we'll get to the Japanese invasion next.

- Yep.

- You buy that narrative?

- Yeah. Except the CCP was established in '21.

- '21, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

- What's important because the united front is in '23. Now, that's a very important date because in reality, from '21 to '23, first of all, this Communist Party of China is established by the Kuomintang.

- Not by Mao.

- It is not by Mao. But there are about-

- The Kuomintang is the Communist International. It's by foreigners who established the CCP.

- Yes.

- Correct?

- Yes, so there are Bolshevik agents, Soviet agents who come in 1919 after the Communist International, Kuomintang is established in Moscow with the explicit purpose of overthrowing by all means available, "the international bourgeoisie," quote, unquote. In other words, the explicit mission is to just overthrow those in power and establish the communist regime. These agents arrive in 1919, start cultivating a number of individuals, which you can count on the fingers of about two hands by 1920-21, the Communist Party is established with the help of the Soviet advisors, but remains absolutely, I would say entirely irrelevant. It's unable to attract more than about a couple of dozen of people until '23. What happens in '23? Well, '23 is another party in Guangzhou, Canton, just across the border from Hong Kong. These are the nationalists. The future Chiang Kai-shek will be leader of the nationalists at this point in time, the leader of Sun Yat-sen. And they want to unify the entire country. And they're determined to do it by force, through violence, which is, you know.

- So these are not sweethearts either.

- These are not sweethearts, exactly. So they need support. And this is when Moscow comes in, they say it's a sort of Trojan horse. They say, "We can give you weapons, support, money if you accept members of the Chinese Communist Party inside the ranks of the nationalist party." So both parties agree, reluctantly, in the united front, engineered again by a Kuomintang agent, Hank Snavely, the Dutch. So without these Bolshevik agents, including Hank Snavely and many others, there would never have been anything.

- Your Dutch, your compatriot Hank Snavely is in one way or another being controlled by Stalin.

- Oh, he's a Kuomintang envoy. Of course he's controlled by Stalin, this is not quite Stalin yet, almost, by '23, but we're getting there very fast.

- All right.

- And from roughly from '25 onwards, it is Stalin and his envoys who pretty much determine every twist and turn of the Communist Party in China and repeatedly save German Mao and his gorilla fighters from being annihilated by the nationalists. So from '23 onwards, there's a very uneasy united front between the nationalists and the communists.

- All right, get us to the Long March. Get to the falling out between those two parties.

- Though very fast. The nationalists assembled an army of about 100,000 soldiers with help. At this point, you have this nationalist army is pretty much in the hands of a Russian, tall man with a mane of hair called Mikhail Borodin. So Borodin is in charge of a very large force inside China, which explicitly wishes to overthrow the government in Beijing. They go on a Northern expedition in 1926, succeed in unifying the South in 1927. But within the ranks of the nationalist party, communists incite crowds to mob landowners, rich merchants, gentry, anyone who is seen as a potential enemy. And, in particular, foreigners seen as agents of imperialism to the point whereby March, 1927, there is a flood of foreigners leaving the valley towards Shanghai. And Chiang Kai-shek realizes that the communists are basically destroying that project of his, which is to unite the country. So on the 24th of March, communist forces massacre a number of foreigners in Nanjing, burn buildings, create an incident which is hardly mentioned in the history books, which prompts Chiang Kai-shek to think we should get rid of those communists. So that's the break in 1927.

- 1927. All right.

- From there on was '27 to '28-

- By the way, Frank, could we pause for just a moment? So, Chiang Kai-shek, we've already established, the nationalists are not sweethearts, but he's not a communist. Just take a moment to describe, because what we're getting here, what we are moving to very quickly is the communists on one side and Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists on the other. What did Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists stand for?

- The nationalists stand for a united nation, but I mean, a unified China devoid, but they're all fighting against what they perceive as foreign oppression.

- Yes.

- And what in reality is, one has to accept, is a treaty port system, which evolved throughout the 19th century by which foreign powers have been leased or granted concessions on which they can live. Also concessions for building railways. This is seen as an imperialist presence. And, of course, these concessions must be abolished. And they will be, as a matter of fact.

- As Chiang Kai-shek, in his effort to unify the country, the notion here, the implicit notion is that in one way or another, he doesn't want to reestablish an emperor. He doesn't want to go back to the imperial system. But in one way or another, he's still Confucian, he's still in some basic way in touch with the traditional Chinese. This is not an agent of the Rockefellers. This is not an explicit capitalist. It's not a man who wants to impose Western values. Is that fair or not?

- Absolutely. This is a man who went to Moscow and instantly recognized that the Kuomintang only wanted to use his party to pursue their own aims. So he's no communist, not even from day one. And what he wants is what most people want, a reasonably stable, wealthy, independent nation. That's what he tries to achieve. Unfortunately, the means is through an army. So it's unification imposed at the barrel of a gun from above. And that's a mistake because once you start with this Northern expedition, in its trail, there are all sorts of communist cells that continue to incite mobs to-

- In his rear, so to speak.

- Yes. Exactly.

- So, get us to simply because it's such a-

- It's a very long, complex story.

- Gimme the simplest possible version of the Long March.

- Yeah, so the Long March is a bit later, but roughly '27, united front is broken, communists expelled, and they're now out there in the wilderness. They survive through plunder more or less, trying to see small county towns until roughly 1930 when again Stalin intervenes, gives them more help, '29, 1930.

- Where are they getting their weapons?

- Soviet Union.

- All right.

- And also plunder, you take a town, you execute the mayor and other power holders. You recruit some of the manager soldiers at the barrel of a gun yet again, and you use some of the money to buy your weapons. But they're out in the wilderness. And then very gradually, from '30, '31 onwards, they manage to establish a few Soviets. Soviets being, you know, a system based on the Soviet Union, in very inhospitable parts of the country, generally up in the mountains, along borders of several provinces. They managed to do that. But of course they are encircled several times. They collapse mainly because they're unable to run any kind of economy so the Soviets tend to collapse of their own in any event. And by 1934, Mao is forced out. The Long March really is a long retreat and an absolute disaster in that he leaves with forces that count in the 80,000.

- [Peter] Right.

- And arrives at a mere 6,000 a year later in the North of China.

- Death desertion, the usual story of a retreating army.

- Yes. So by 1936, the Communist Party of China has about 40,000 members in the population of half a billion. You got to constantly remind yourself that we're talking about a country that's the size of Europe, we're talking about European Union, others a good thing or not. But you know, what an accomplishment. China's big.

- You make the point that through most of this history, the Communist Party of Italy, the Communist Party of France, had more members as a proportion of the population than did the Communist Party of China.

- Oh, let me give you some numbers. This is the most spectacular, I think, thing that we've overlooked. We tend to think, anyway, Wikipedia, professional historians, you read about the communists and the nationalists in the 1920s and '30s, it is as if there is some sort of equivalence between these.

- Yes, yes, exactly.

- As if that is all that determines history. You know, which one will win, which one will prevail? Whereas in reality, by 1936, as I said, they represent a mere fraction of the population. So take for instance, Salazar, 1934, roughly the same time.

- Dictator of Portugal.

- Dictator of Portugal. In that country, roughly one out of 280 people is a communist.

- Even under Salazar.

- Even under Salazar.

- Who if you could find that one in 280 people would put every single one of them in prison.

- Probably would. Finland, where the Communist Party is banned, one in 700 people is a communist. Now, if you take Guangzhou province, which may be an extreme case, but in 1939, Guangzhou province, very much in the hinterland, impoverished, lots of poor farmers, ripe for revolution, according to Marxist dogma, one in 25,000 people. In fact, if you look carefully, according to the Kuomintang itself in 1940, one in every 107,000 people, these are inflated figures. One in 107,000 is a communist, which happens to be the exact same proportion as in the United States of America, which is not exactly seen as a sort of vanguard of the world revolution, right? So it is a tiny fraction of the population.

- So when Edgar Snow is in Shaanxi interviewing Mao and Commander P'eng.

- Yeah.

- He is there at the very moment when they have completed this long and humiliating retreat. And managed to shrink their own forces from in the range of how many soldiers, how many began the Long March?

- There are several Soviets, but the one with the Long March, the official Long March, 80,000 soldiers roughly.

- 80,000 and down to 6,000.

- [Frank] Down to 6,000.

- And Edgar Snow shows up at this moment and portrays them all as heroes.

- Yes.

- All right.

- Let me tell you one more thing, who's the one who saves them? 'Cause at this point, it would be very easy to eliminate them. What kind of message do they have? Those extraterritorial treaties, the treaty port system has, for the greatest part, already been abolished by the nationalists and the central government. From 1927 onwards, many of these concessions have been surrendered to the central government, or a promise has been made that Shanghai after 10 years and Shaanxi after five years will be returned to the government. Tariff autonomy has been restored. The whole treaty port system by, for all intents and purposes, by 1933, has already been abolished.

- So it's under Chiang.

- Under Chiang-

- That the company sheds these humiliations.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

- Under Chiang Kai-shek.

- So, the communists have very little appeal under the Stalin who comes in yet again, he always comes in, we don't have time to do the whole history of Stalin in China, that'd be a long one. And Stalin says in 1936, "You should unite with Chiang Kai-shek and nationalists to fight the Japanese, that's the real problem. They just don't want, they wanna fight Chiang Kai-shek.

- All right. Which brings us to part two of this history. And again, I will trot out the standard narrative, which is that the Japanese invade China in 1937.

- Yep.

- And I'm gonna quote you here, actually I'll get straight to your account of this. "Red Dawn Over China," quote, "The Japanese Army would do what the communists were not in a position to accomplish, namely attack, destroy or displace government troops," the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists, "from all the major cities along the coast. The communists remained safely ensconced in the hinterland."

- Yes.

- So Mao's up here declining to engage the Japanese himself.

- Yes.

- But permitting Chiang Kai-shek to take the full brunt of the Japanese attack, down through Manchuria and along the coast.

- Absolutely. That war that starts in July, 1937 by Japan is ferocious. It really is the start of the Second World War.

- Yes.

- You know, as a European, I tend to think of it more as '39 September, but no, it's really '37. And there's mass bombing of cities, the use of gas on civilians, the systematic rape and murder of at least 200,000 people in Nanjing, battles that are just, you know, flesh, metal, awful. The scale of it is just horrendous. There's Chiang Kai-shek and the central government that bears the brunt of that while within this united front that hasn't been imposing Chiang Kai-shek because he needs help from the Soviet Union to fight the Japanese. And, again, the Soviet Union says, "Yes, we will help, but you must accept the communists." But the communists don't do very much at all. There's one battle by Lin Biao in September '37, doesn't really amount to very much. So what happens is, in effect, from '37 to '41, on the one hand, the communists get funding from the central government. 75 to 90% of the funding comes from the nationalists plus funding from Stalin, Moscow. But what the communists do is wait for the Japanese to displace the nationalists, the central government, and then take their position behind Japanese forces. That's what they do.

- All right.

- In fact, they are fighting the KMT.

- KMT, Kuomintang.

- They're trying to displace them and fight them, not quite alongside the Japanese, but using the Japanese as an opportunity.

- The real enemy was the KMT.

- Yes, to reoccupy parts of the-

- All right, so Frank, now we come to Americans may, to the extent that Americans know, have some feel for the history of the rise of the communists. Now we come to the part that Americans do perhaps have some feel for, and that is the formal end of the Second World War in 1945 to 1949, which is when the communists succeed, they defeat Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists withdraw to Taiwan, where they remain today, of course, Taiwan remains separate today. Now, so let me quote your book on this period, because so far you have described the communists, small, weak, constantly requiring support from Mao. "Red Dawn Over China." "Attrition gradually emerged as the key approach, as the communists showed greater determination than the government to wage a war of fire, famine, and sword." This of course is reminiscent, in my mind, I immediately thought of the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks.

- Yep.

- Lenin won in 1917 because he decided to be more of a son of a bitch than the socialists. He was willing to kill and they were not. All right. So, "The communists showed greater determination. Cities begin to topple, their leaders fearful of the consequences of resisting the communists. Throughout the civil war," this to me is very telling, "Throughout the civil war," between the communists and the nationalists, "millions of refugees try to escape, pouring into government-occupied territory" They stream toward the nationalists, toward the KMT. "No one ever witnessed people fleeing toward communist-controlled areas," close quote. And yet, in the end, the communist wind and Chiang Kai-shek withdraws to Taiwan. Two questions.

- Yep.

- How did that happen? How did they go from being pathetic, determined, wicked, evil, bailed out by Stalin. But now they are in control of the most populous country on Earth in 1949. And two, what role did the Americans play? Weren't we supposed to be helping Chiang? How could Chiang possibly have lost without support? Okay, so, give us this period.

- It's fascinating. Let me ask you a question. Why did East Germany become communist?

- Because we let the Soviets impose communism on it.

- Because the Red Army arrived.

- I see what you're saying, yes, yes, yes.

- Same story for Romania.

- Stalin was in charge on the ground.

- Same story for Hungary. Red Army invades half of Europe and stays.

- Right.

- Now, that's exactly what happens in 1949. I get out, "Oh, if the communists were so weak in the 1930s with so little appeal, how come they managed?" Because the Soviet Union occupies all of Manchuria. Now, Manchuria is bigger than Japan, the size of roughly two large European countries, let's say United Kingdom and France.

- The Japanese are defeated and the Soviets move into the territory that they had control-

- August '45. The Americans wanted the Russians to help because when they agreed that the Russians should help and gave them large amounts of land lease material, enough to pump up the Soviet army to about a million man in Siberia, of course, Roosevelt thought that there would, it'd be very difficult to get all the way to Tokyo whatnot with all those battles on islands, canal, huge cost. Nobody realized that there would be an atom bomb, a new weapon available, which of course erases Hiroshima in August '45. Now, literally a day or two later, Stalin, in accordance with the agreement with the Americans, does invade Manchuria on the way to Korea. He stops on the 38th parallel, but Manchuria, he turns over to the communists, as I said, big country, extremely wealthy in natural resources, strategic gateway to the rest of China to the North-

- I've never thought of this before. It's the Red Army that conquers.

- It is the Red Army that conquers all of Manchuria. And whoever has Manchuria as the Manchus experienced in 1644 when they invited, when they invaded China, as you have Manchuria is very easy to breach the Great Wall of China and take the rest of the country. So the Soviets don't just disappear, they stay there until May, 1946. And they help the communists turn their ragtag army of guerrilla fighters into a formidable fighting machine. 16 military academies are established. Some of the soldiers are sent to Moscow for advanced training. Train loads of material come from both North Korea and Siberia, both deliver weapons.

- And what aren't we-

- And what did the Americans do?

- Yes. Go ahead.

- Well, the Americans starts, the story with the American starts in '43 when Roosevelt sends his Vice President called Henry Wallace. Henry Wallace first goes to Siberia. Visits what you and I would call Magadan, would refer to as the Gulag, is deeply impressed, arrives in Shaanxi, speaks to Chiang Kai-shek, says, "Ah, you really should do what the Soviets are doing in Siberia. It's a great economic model." Now, in the meantime, he and the American ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, have been told by Stalin himself, these are not real communists. The Chinese communists are margarine communists. You know, they're just agrarian reformers. So from there onwards, Henry Wallace and others, including Joseph Stilwell and Marshall, I'll come to him in a moment, they insist. But the legitimate government of China, Chiang Kai-shek creates a united front, a coalition with the communists.

- So we, Chiang Kai-shek struggles from the 1920s on to get the communists out.

- Yes.

- Of the KMT.

- Yes.

- Stalin keeps trying to reimpose the communists.

- Yes, twice Stalin succeeds.

- On Chiang Kai-shek, twice Stalin forces. And then we come along and do exactly the same thing.

- Do it better. Do what Stalin would've liked to do at no cost to Stalin. So Marshall arrives in December '45.

- George Marshall.

- George Marshall, tall man, piercing blue eyes.

- In December of 1945, he's still Army Chief of Staff or is he by now Secretary of State?

- So he's been sent to take control and impose a coalition in China. And he's got-

- Wait, which month is this again?

- We're talking December '45.

- Okay.

- It's past the second rule-

- Roosevelt is dead, and now we have Truman in charge.

- This is Truman.

- Okay. Right.

- There's Truman in charge.

- Right. He sends Marshall.

- Absolutely. Truman, very important. So January '46, George Marshall imposes a truce and says, "You must sign a truce and have a coalition with the communists." The very day that the communists sign the truce and the nationalists, the communists attack forces in Yingkou, a port in Manchuria.

- They violate the agreement that they signed.

- They violate the agreement on the very day that they sign it. Four months later, in May 46th, the Soviets leave Manchuria. The nationalist central government really starts moving along the railways up north and manage to defeat the communists to the point where Lin Biao, the key man in charge of the communists has to retreat all the way to and would have repulsed out of China into Siberia had it not been for one man who insisted yet again on the truce. And that is of course George Marshall. And if that is not enough, later on in September '46, even as the Soviets are arming the communists to the teeth, Marshall imposes an arms embargo that will last for roughly one year on the nationalists. So they have to fight with their hands bound behind their back. Not only that, they must run a country the size of Europe. And like Europe, China is a collection of rubble. Right, Europe is devastated.

- Yes, yes.

- China is devastated. He must, on his own, reconstruct an entire country and fight the communists whose only task is to sabotage that effort at reconstruction. It is enough for the communists to blow up a piece of railway to fell a number of telegraphs poles to handicap what they see as their enemy, which is the central government.

- Now, what was Marshall thinking?

- Oh, I can tell you exactly what he thought. He had an aide called Alvan Gillem and he pointed out to his boss Marshall that the communists were the ones who were constantly fighting his wall and breaching every agreement, promise, truce, coalition that had signed to.

- About which the aide was correct.

- About which he was correct. But Marshall just shrugged it off and said, "No, I've seen the communists and they're not real communists."

- So he bought that line.

- He bought that line, the very line that was started of course, by-

- Agrarian reformers.

- Agrarian reformers.

- All right.

- In the meantime, by the way, you will have noticed that that very same Truman that we just mentioned earlier on in '47, or is it '48, is very keen on helping fight the communists in Greek, Greece, and in Turkey.

- Yes, yes, yes, Harry Truman, Harry Truman clues into what's really going on.

- Yes.

- So that question that haunted much of American politics during the McCarthy period. Who lost China?

- Yes.

- The answer is that to the extent that we ourselves, that is to say the Americans were responsible for losing China, it wasn't that there were communist sympathizers who had infiltrated high levels of the American government, it was the usual American story of total naivete.

- Utterly naive. Although we did have spies, we did have spies, John Service, who was sent to Yan'An in 1944, admitted to the British journalist Jonathan Mirsky before he died. He was in a retirement home, I think he died around about '99. Jonathan Mirsky found him a year earlier, actually admitted that he had given the order of battle to a spy working on behalf of the Kremlin, and of course Chairman Mao. So there were spies. There were spies there. But the point is they were naive. Unlike the Brits, if I may say so, 'cause the Brits right away said, you know, the Brits, they had an empire and the Second World War was the end of the empire. But when you run an empire for a good 100 years or more, you do acquire-

- You recognize the son of a bitch.

- You recognize the son of a bitch. And they knew that if you cannot impose a coalition in Greece, and fundamentally you cannot force two parties who are armed and unwilling to collaborate, to enter a coalition. And look at what happened in Greece, the moment the Brits take Athens in October '44, this coalition collapses and it's followed by a brutal civil war, extremely costly for all of Greece. And the same thing happens in China.

- So, in a certain sense, it's a question of timing. Harry Truman figures out what Stalin is up to in time, so to speak, that as the British withdraw from Greece.

- Yes.

- Truman announces the Truman Doctrine. And we go into Greece and we begin to give support to Turkey. And then we get this so-called Marshall Plan. And then we get NATO. And in Korea, and during the Berlin crisis of 1948, there's this absolutely marvelous passage in the, it's in one man's diary. He became secretary of defense, can't remember his name just now, but he writes that as Stalin put pressure on Berlin, there was a big meeting at the White House and they went around the room and every single advisor, the generals and the diplomats all told Truman that Berlin was indefensible. And Truman said, "We stay in Berlin, period." But there was no moment. It had already come. If we were too late in China, there was no moment when Harry Truman said, "We support Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing, or , or Beijing, period." That didn't happen.

- For Truman, it was Europe first.

- Yes, yes, yes.

- Not only that, not only that, but when it was suggested that he might wish to help the KMT.

- Yes.

- Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist, the Republic of China. It's not just a party, it's a universally-recognized government since 1928. It is one of the four powers in Cairo.

- Yes.

- It is an ally that tied down a vast number of Japanese troops. The Americans walk away, not only that, but when suggested that besides Greece and Turkey, Chiang Kai-shek should be helped, Truman says, "That would be like pouring sand down a rat hole."

- All right.

- He may have had a point, just to go back to what you said earlier on, at this point, by 1947, the communists fight a war which you simply cannot win with human waves, that sending unarmed to absorb the bullets, you cannot defeat them. You cannot defeat the enemy. It's very difficult to fight communists who are determined to use attrition and prevail at every course. So there's one example I want to give you as well, that is the siege of Changchun, city all the way up in Manchuria, which is besieged for about, I think eight months or so with Lin Biao building a perimeter with barricades, trenches four meters deep, barbed wire, a sentry every 50 meters, and more or less orders that city to be starved into surrender. He says, "Let Changchun starve into surrender." 160 ordinary civilians are trapped and die of hunger. So now you can see what happens, if you're the mayor of Beijing and you see this flood of refugees that come out Manchuria where one city after the other is being besieged-

- You say to yourself, "Let's cut a deal."

- Let's cut a deal.

- Yeah.

- Is this worth it? Probably not.

- So Frank, can I just take as a sort of summary, I'd like to ask about China today, but as a summary statement, I repeat for our viewers that you have written a book, which is a magnificent book, and as far as I can tell, singular in taking seriously this, and taking seriously and writing afresh the history of the rise of the Communist China.

- Thank you.

- So we only have a conversation, there is a book to read, but I take this as a kind of summary statement if I may, from "Red Dawn Over China," your book, "Almost every European country, with the exception of Nazi Germany, boasted a larger number of communists as a proportion of their overall population than any province in China. Communism was never popular in China any more so than in the United States. It was imposed on the population at the barrel of a gun."

- I would say that's a pretty good summary.

- All right, so China today, could I just ask, this is almost a question, it's not a question of history exactly, but of how human beings lead their lives. Here's the question. We now have a China, which under the communists, there was a long and complicated history, and I refer people to your trilogy. You've written the history. But in spite of the starvations and the revolutionary act, in spite of all of it, under this country, hundreds of millions of people, by no means all of them, but hundreds of millions of people have moved from poverty to something like a decent life. There's a large, what we would recognize as a middle class and frankly in a not insignificant number of really truly rich Chinese. We read the other day that the Chinese electronic vehicle company has now overtaken Tesla and is beginning to find ways to export. And then we have Xi Jinping who dresses like a Western businessman, speaks of coexisting and finding a new way forward. Is it possible, so we have all of that, and yet at the same time, they will not speak about their own history. They will not permit it to be addressed the way you just addressed it. We have that official romanticized, excuse me, the romanticized version has become in effect the official history of China and it is untrue. All right. Against that, you have modern Germany, which underwent de-Nazification, which has spent essentially seven decades in a kind of protracted act of penance for what their grandfathers did. And we can talk about whether the Germans should be spending more on their own defenses, but they have built a genuinely humane and decent, we can talk about whether they should have free or, but it's a decent and humane country. Can China, can any country simply bury a monstrous past and get on with it? Or is there always something? Is there always, is there in some level that we can perceive that, well, people will somehow sense, do we have some version of "Lady Macbeth" washing her hands incessantly because the country was built on the blood of tens of millions?

- The path forward-

- I'm putting it melodramatically, but you see what I'm getting at? You're a western European, you know what I'm trying to say.

- The past will always come back and bite you.

- It will.

- Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's all nice and well to believe some of that, you know, that facade of stability and wealth, the People's Republic of China, but as Li Keqiang himself said, the Premier before he died a few years ago, some 600 million Chinese live on less than $140 a month. There's great poverty there. Yes, cars, 500 companies, 400 went bankrupt, electrical cars, 400 went bankrupt between 2018-2024. So this is the great thing about Yan'An, in Yan'An in Shaanxi province under Mao from '44 to '45, American journalists visited. And what do they see? They see model prisons. They see model schools. They see model farms and everybody is told to be open-minded and friendly. Mao Zedong himself comes up with a policy he calls the new democracy where he promises that there will be respect for human property. There will be opposition parties, there will be true democracy unlike the fascism of Chiang Kai-shek. So is China all that different today? The vast amounts of money spent on projecting that image of prosperity with constant propaganda about this, the endless achievements of that country, I think is pretty much in the same system. And if you are in it, you can actually never examine your own past. You're basically trapped.

- Trapped.

- So on the one hand, you have a state of enforced amnesia about the past. And as a result of that enforced amnesia, the same mistakes are being made time and again.

- Frank, here's a counter argument. So by the way, when we did our last show, which got a huge response by the way, as you know, it was more than a million people viewed that show on YouTube and I've looked through the comments. Most of the people liked you, but some of the people said, "No, no, this is just a comedy basher," this is just an old-fashioned comedy basher." So, there's that that's out there. Here's headline in "The New York Times." This is just a couple weeks ago. "Chinese universities surge in global rankings as U.S. schools slip." Okay. So, all right. There's an answer there. Here's an excerpt. "Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at number one. Only one Chinese school, 20 years ago, Zhejiang University would even make the top 25. Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list and seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10," close quote. So there, Frank, look at 'em. They're the future.

- Yeah. Do you think I'm the only one who laughs? Those statistics are being laughed at by ordinary people inside the PRC. This is considered to be a great joke. Yes, they've poured vast amounts of money into higher education. Yes, they spend a lot of money hiring the very best people including from this country and Europe. And no doubt there are many great achievements. But the whole thing, like anything else, how do you even measure it? And what kind of pursuit of knowledge could there be in a country where you're not allowed to compare the man in charge to Winnie the Pooh, you know, when "1984" by George Orwell is forbidden along a long list of other publications, including perfectly ordinary newspapers, including "The New York Times" where you have a handful of journalists who must report on the country without the means of doing so.

- Could I suggest Dikotter's law? I'm going to suggest a law.

- Go ahead.

- Just Dikotter's law.

- Go ahead.

- That no country can produce genuinely great universities in which academics do not feel free to tell the truth about the past of the country itself.

- It's always-

- Would you like to sign up to that law?

- Sure, sure. I would say it's a systemic issue and you can always point at some advantage of a one-party state. You can always say-

- Great EVs, wonderful airports, lovely high speed trains.

- Yeah. Same thing of course with the Soviet Union. You know, same thing with Mussolini, the trains arrive on time.

- Moscow subway stations, they're meant to be good.

- Wonderful subway stations. I've visited them many times, I admire them. But the point really is that these are systemic constraints. If a regime decides that it must excel at making electric cars, it will succeed. It will succeed. If it insists that it must lead in AI, it will probably not succeed, although it will look as if it's doing pretty damn well because it will pour vast amounts of resources into that particular field. But it is not a system which allows for constant innovation coming from all sorts of very unexpected corners, including your proverbial garage.

- Got it. All right. Frank, Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek withdraws to Taiwan in 1949.

- Here we are.

- Here we are now. Chiang Kai-shek, it was a tough regime. The nationalists got a little rough on the native population.

- Very rough. White Terror

- Very rough. And it operates essentially as a dictatorship, the history is very, can be put, I think I can put it fairly and briefly, dictatorship, economic freedom, democracy. So today, Taiwan is, I believe this is fair to say, it's not an illusion, it is a genuine operating democracy with true freedom of the press.

- Absolutely.

- They have very vigorous press. Hotly contested elections.

- Absolutely.

- And an economy that produces, among other things, what we're told again and again and again is all the high-value semiconductors produced on the face of the planet.

- Absolutely.

- Come from Taiwan. Okay. So here's a long-ish quotation, but I think it's worth it. This is from the new National Security Strategy, which the White House published last December. Quote, "There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan's dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters." All right. "Given that 1/3 of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the U.S. economy. Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch," unquestioned American military superiority is what overmatch means, "is a priority. We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain." China expert, Michael D. Swaine, says, "Past National Security Strategy documents viewed a threat to the security of Taiwan as a threat to regional peace and stability. The new NSS, the Trump NSS, for the first time strongly implies that Chinese control over Taiwan would represent a threat to U.S. interests," close quote. All right, that's a lot of wind to say that although Trump's first, Trump's former National Security Advisor, John Bolton wrote in his memoir that Trump repeatedly would point to the tip of his pen and say, "This is Taiwan." And then point to his desk and say, "This is China." As if to say, "This is not important, there's nothing we could do." Here we have Trump in the second term saying in print, that island matters not just to the region, but to us. Good move? How would this be understood in Beijing? What's your view?

- A good move in Ukraine would have been to arm it to the teeth. A good move today with Taiwan would be to arm it to the teeth. Taiwan is essential, absolutely essential.

- All right. One more question if I may on China today. Here's a headline in "The New York Times," "Xi's Purge of China's Military Brings Its Top General Down. The ouster of General Zhang," I don't know how to pronounce this, Zhang Youxia, "who was second only to Xi Jinping in the military hierarchy marks 'the total annihilation of the high command,' one analyst said."

- Yes.

- "It is still more," I'm reading now from the body of the article, "still more astonishing because General Zhang seemed to be a confidant of Mr. Xi. Their fathers knew each other in the old days under Mao. The most drastic steps so far in Mr. Xi Jinping's years-long campaign to root out what has been described as corruption and disloyalty in the military senior ranks."

- Yep.

- Okay. What do you make of that?

- Well, Zhang Youxia.

- Thank you.

- Purged, top man, military commission, seven people on it. Xi Jinping, six others. At this point in time, of these seven people, we still have Xi Jinping and one other man.

- Xi Jinping has gotten rid of five out of the others.

- Five of the others are gone.

- Five out of six of the others.

- Yes, yes. Five of these six others are gone. So that makes you think.

- But, you know, Frank, if you read "The New York Times," here they're quoting an analyst that Xi Jinping decided he must cut deep generationally to find a group not tainted by graft and corruption. If you read "The New York Times," Xi Jinping is a good guy. He's just trying to stamp out graft and corruption.

- Isn't he? You see, the first one who started stamping out corruption among the ranks of the Communist Party was good old chairman Mao, right away, 1950 was after one year in power. So the point really is quite simple. This is a Communist Party. There are no opposition parties. Whatever opposition there might be is underground. You could be opposing me although you pretend to be my very best friend. I don't know. You keep it very quiet. So what do I do as number one? I have a purge of the ranks every couple of years. And what I'm after is not really corruption. What I'm after is the people I think might oppose me, my real or imagined enemies. During the cultural revolution for Mao, there is literally millions of people overthrown. Anyone who ever said anything that might be perceived as disloyal to the Chairman. Thank God, Xi Jinping hasn't reached that stage yet. But the key point is that in, you remember the term I used, systemic, in a one-party state without a free press, without free unions, without free opposition parties, you do not know who is corrupt. And in effect, it means that every party member is corrupt so you cannot purge all of them. It's not possible. They're all corrupt. He himself is corrupt and his family. So the point is that you use this corruption to purge those, get rid of those you think might potentially be an enemy. Now, if-

- If you're not sure, if you make a mistake.

- That doesn't matter.

- It doesn't matter because it keeps everybody else on their toes.

- Exactly. It is better to eliminate 100 people who are innocent than to let one enemy fly under the radar. So the point really here is that this man has been in charge, more or less, since 2012. Where are we now? 2026, 14 years. And you have been unable to put in place a military team at the highest level that you yourself can trust? It says I think a lot about you and it says a lot about your system.

- Could I also ask whether it says a lot about whether we can relax a little bit on the question of Taiwan?

- Never.

- Never?

- No.

- But how could Xi Jinping move against Taiwan when he doesn't have generals in place?

- You should never relax because these people are absolutely relentless. Absolutely relentless.

- All right.

- You'd never relax.

- Frank, a couple of final questions. You're Dutch. How did you become, you have now given your professional life to the study of China.

- For my sins.

- How did this happen? How did you become a sinologist, I'll use the fancy word for it.

- No, it's fine. It's not a term I like, but I understand why, it's very simple. My family moved to Switzerland when I was 12-years-old. I went to the University of Geneva.

- Moved from-

- From the Netherlands. At university, I did Russian, I did Chinese, I did history. But my conclusion when I graduated in 1985 is that all I knew was really about Europe and I just wanted to see the world. So I picked the most remote spot on planet Earth and that was China. And off I went, off I went. Spent a couple of years.

- And it turned out to be fortuitous that you had read both Russian and Chinese at university because at the point you made earlier that you can't do Chinese history without reading Russian.

- So this is exactly what happened the moment I arrived in August, 1985, I realized that all my peers from Harvard University, Laden, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, were all very good with the Chinese, but couldn't tell the difference between a Lenin and a Stalin. And they, of course, that system is behind the PRC.

- All right, Frank, last couple of questions here. If you could offer, you can't obviously, but I want to get at a kind of summation of your thinking. If you were in a position to offer one or two sentences of advice.

- Yep.

- And they were forced to listen, to Xi Jinping, what would you say and to Donald Trump, what would you say?

- So Trump, I'm not going to give any advice that, but to Xi Jinping, what kind of advice would you give? He can't hear. He is trapped, again, I use the term systemic, but he's grown up in this system, which is convinced that there is a camp out there, an imperialist camp, a system called capitalism that is profoundly wicked and is out there to get the Communist Party of China. It's a very sort of paranoid view.

- But hold on.

- There's very little you can do about this.

- Are you convinced that he and the top members of the party really believe that at this stage? He's traveled to this country, he's shaken hands with Joe Biden, he's seen what sweet people we really are. He's just engaged in great power politics of the 19th century variety. Don't you think, Frank?

- You think he, first of all, you think he's traveled? I mean, most of these people in charge are caveman Marxists, including the ones running Hong Kong. They can barely speak a foreign language, they've barely been abroad. These are not, you know, unlike the 1920s and the '30s. Now under, in the 1930s and the central government, there were Americans who would visit China and say that there were more people in China at the time, 1930s, who could speak good English than there were in continental Europe. It was an extraordinarily open period of time, that's not China today. These people are barely aware, you know, of the massive differences that exist between communist systems and the rest of the world, that they barely traveled. This is a system where you must constantly watch your back, constantly keep up tabs.

- Even Xi Jinping?

- Xi Jinping, in particular, which man can he trust? I just told you, he doesn't trust five out of the six people on his Military Committee. You think he trusts the other ones on the other committees? You cannot approach him without going through a metal detector. He doesn't trust anyone. But the key point is that it's systemic. It isn't just Xi Jinping, all the others don't trust the others either. Nobody can say anything openly.

- Okay, so Frank, this is the last question. This really is the last question. And if you don't wanna talk about Donald Trump, Donald Trump is a problem for many people, we'll set that aside. But the question of American policy, containment in the old Cold War against the Soviet Union.

- Yes.

- It worked.

- Yes.

- I mean, I think a lot of people resist the idea that anybody won the Cold War, but I would point out that the Soviet Union went out of existence. That's not a victory.

- Yes.

- We contained them, we maintained, and it was not easy across four decades to sustain political support for it, but we maintained military equality and then toward the end undoubted supremacy.

- [Frank] Yes.

- And they-

- I understand what you're saying.

- And so, what is the game against let's say China?

- As I said last time, you remember I did say, I didn't use the term containment, but I did say lock them in, 'cause they themselves-

- Lock them in.

- They themselves are very keen on limiting all knowledge from abroad, keen on limiting foreigners being established in China, keen on limiting whatever products we can sell them. The whole idea is just sort of self-reliance, and that's being built up even more now that they fear that there might be war with that imperialist camp. So I'd say containment. Second one I would say reciprocity, tit for tat. You don't want our journalists, we don't want yours. You do this, we do the same thing.

- Okay, so here's the hard one if I may ask about this, sorry-

- There's a third one, by the way.

- Go ahead, go to the third one.

- And the third one is stand up. Stand up, stand up. This is a big bully that huffs and puffs, but its aircraft carriers aren't all that great, its economy isn't all that great. Its political stability isn't all that stable.

- You would recommend a president-

- Be a little tougher.

- To call them out the way Ronald Reagan called out the Soviets.

- Yes, exactly.

- All right, so here's what I meant by the tough one when you talked about reciprocity. I don't know how many students we have studying in China, but it can't be a large number. But I do happen to know that we have over 400,000 Chinese nationals studying at American universities right now.

- Yes.

- And how would you handle that problem?

- Yes.

- So you can't, you'd wanna kick them all out?

- You're quite right. The reciprocity means that it is a tit for tat approach, but you cannot become like the enemy.

- Right.

- You do not wish to do what they do to their own people and to outsiders.

- We don't wanna lock ourselves down.

- We do not wish to lock ourselves in. We do not wish to treat everybody as a potential spy. In fact, the greatest people in this country who could help are precisely from the People's Republic of China. The smartest students I've ever had, the ones who can see it from the inside out, come from the POC, but obviously not everyone. So it's very much a matter of which particular individual. You can't just become afraid of people because they hole from the People's Republic of China.

- Frank Dikotter, along with John Paul II, "Be not afraid."

- "Be not afraid."

- Frank.

- Yes.

- Thank you. Frank Dikotter, author of "Red Dawn Over China: "How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity." For "Uncommon Knowledge," the Hoover Institution and Fox News, I'm Peter Robinson.