Bøker av Frank Dikotter

Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as ''definitive and harrowing'' , this is the final volume of ''The People''s Trilogy'', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao''s Great Famine.After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the marked and hollow out the party''s ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao''s regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikotter casts China''s most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikotter''s extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking ''People''s Trilogy'' is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People''s Republic of China.

In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing''s Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life. In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dik├╢tter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao''s court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths.

_______________A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR'A revolutionary book' Sunday Times'A pulsating account that makes clear how important it is to look beneath the surface when it comes to any period or region in history - but above all to China' Peter Frankopan, TLS'Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today's China and what the Chinese Communist Party's choices mean for the rest of the world' New Statesman Books of the Year_______________From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine, a timely and compelling account of China in the wake of Chairman MaoIn China After Mao, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter explores how the People's Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. His account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, from the secret minutes of top party meetings to confidential bank reports. Unfolding with great narrative sweep, this riveting, richly detailed chronicle recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers celebrate as an economic miracle.In charting four decades of so-called 'Reform and Opening Up' and China's emergence as a world power, Dikötter tells a fascinating tale of contradictions and illusions, of shadow banking, anti-corruption drives and extreme state wealth standing alongside everyday poverty. He examines China's approach to the 2008 financial crash, the country's increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship - one equipped with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. Ultimately, the book concludes, the communist party's goal was never to join the democratic sphere, but to resist it - and then defeat it.Praise for Frank Dikötter and the People's Trilogy:'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre'The historian of China' Spectator'One of the few books that anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century simply must read' New Statesman'The seminal English language work on the subject' Sunday Times'Gripping and masterful' - Simon Sebag Montefiore

Charts the consumption and spread of foreign goods in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. This volume recounts how exotic commodities were acquired and adapted in a country commonly believed to have remained "hostile toward alien things" during the industrial era.

This fully revised edition shows how and why notions of 'race' became so widespread in China, now updated to include the continuation of this trend into the twenty-first century.

Explains how as a result of British efforts to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other psychoactive substances