Ever since Frank Dikötter's first book . . . this prolific star of China studies has challenged conventional truths and broached taboo subjects . . . Dikötter succeeds at bringing different strands together in a highly readable narrative that challenges the foundational myths of the CCP . . . A valuable reminder that today's China – the prosperous, technologically advanced superpower – is a country built on a foundation of violence . . . A tireless chronicler of the numerous crimes and follies of Chinese Communism, Dikötter once again shows his readers who was pulling the trigger of that gun

Sergey Radchenko, Financial Times

Frank Dikötter has rewritten the early history of the Chinese Communist Party from the ground up. Drawing on archival materials long thought inaccessible, he strips away decades of myth to reveal a story of improvisation, violence and opportunism. Written with precision and verve, Red Dawn Over China is the most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years

PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed

An iconoclastic history of communism in China that makes for unpleasant but ultimately important reading . . . This new book provides excellent coursework. Its author . . . is one of the most accomplished historians of modern China. Red Dawn Over China draws on a multitude of archival and other sources in Chinese, Russian, French, German and English to provide the most comprehensive and critical (in the best historian's sense of the word) one-volume account of the communists' rise to power yet published . . . His aim is to wrest back control over this crucial period in China's history and subject it to evidence-based scrutiny – in simple terms, to tell the truth . . . Dikötter exposes the shibboleths that characterise the official history of Chinese communism for what they are . . . Dikötter has produced a work of historical iconoclasm that will be challenged in some quarters and banned in others . . . A first-class piece of scholarship that sheds light not only on the many dark chapters in the communist conquest of China but also on the complicated wider environment that made it possible

Graham Hutchings, BBC History Magazine

An outstanding scholar . . . Perhaps in the distant future, the people of China will have the opportunity to compare versions of their 20th-century history and arrive at something like a balanced assessment. When that day comes, due credit will have to be given to Frank Dikötter for his achievement in ensuring, almost single-handedly, that accounts of this period are no longer the work of the victors alone

Philip Snow, Literary Review

Frank Dikötter's books have changed the way historians view China. Red Dawn Over China is a commanding new history of China's path to Communism, brought to the people at the barrel of a gun

Maggie Fergusson, Tablet

An account of the surprising realities behind the Communist party's rise in China, from years of plundered villages and minimal popular support to survival under Japanese occupation. Dikötter, an acclaimed historian of China, traces how, with Soviet backing and relentless determination, a marginal movement became a world force

Financial Times, What to Read in 2026