Inside the Rise of Communist China: A Conversation with Frank Dikötter

How did the Chinese Communist Party rise from obscurity to ruling China in less than three decades—and what does that journey tell us about the system it built?

Join the World Affairs Council and historian Frank Dikötter for a fresh examination of China’s Communist Revolution, based on his book Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity. Drawing on Party archives, Dikötter challenges the familiar narrative of a popular, grassroots uprising. Instead, he points to the decisive roles of coercion, organized violence, and sustained support from the Soviet Union in the CCP’s victory in 1949.

This conversation offers a clear, revisionist look at how the Party came to power—and why its origins still shape China’s political system today.

Speaker:

Frank Dikötter is a renowned, award-winning Dutch historian who has written extensively about China. He is the author of the People's Trilogy, a series of books that document the impact of communism on the lives of ordinary people in China on the basis of new archival material. The first volume, entitled Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, Britain's most prestigious book award for non-fiction. The second instalment, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957, was short-listed for the Orwell Prize in 2014. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 concludes the trilogy and was short-listed for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize in 2017. Prior to writing Red Dawn Over China, he also wrote China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower.

Frank has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006. Before coming to Hong Kong he was Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Born in the Netherlands in 1961, he was educated in Switzerland  and graduated from the University of Geneva with a Double Major in History and Russian. After two years in the People's Republic of China, he moved to London where he obtained his PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1990. He stayed at SOAS as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and as Wellcome Research Fellow before being promoted to a personal chair as Professor of the Modern History of China in 2002. His research and writing has been funded by over 2 US$ million in grants from various foundations, including, in Britain, the Wellcome Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Economic and Social Research Council and, in Hong Kong, the Research Grants Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. He holds an honorary doctorate from Leiden University and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Moderator:

Heather Yang Hwalek is a senior program officer for global policy and advocacy at the Gates Foundation. She previously held roles in the foundation’s communications division and the office of the chief executive officer. Before joining the Gates Foundation, Ms. Hwalek was a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State, where she served in U.S. Embassies in Tokyo and Pretoria and the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, in addition to the Office of the Secretary and additional roles in Washington, DC. She is an alumna of the Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship. Ms. Hwalek holds an MA in international relations from Yale University and a BA in anthropology from Columbia University.