Search results for ""author frank dikötter""
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962—1976
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. 'The seminal English language work on the subject’ Sunday Times ‘A major contribution to scholarship on modern China, one that is unequalled, certainly in the English language … both revealing and rewarding reading – for specialists and non-specialists alike' Literary Review 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 market 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 Dikötter 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 Dikötter's extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking 'People's Trilogy' is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People's Republic of China.
£12.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower
'A revolutionary book' Sunday Times 'A pulsating account' Peter Frankopan *A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR* How did the People’s Republic of China transform from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today? Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers alike celebrate as an economic miracle. In a fascinating tale spanning five decades, he examines the country’s economic transformation alongside the regime’s determined suppression of dissent, its increasing hostility towards the West and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship led by Xi Jinping – one equipped with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. ‘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 ‘A blow-by-blow account of the uneven, reactive and sometimes chaotic course of economic policies . . . An important corrective’ Financial Times ‘Dikötter has been mining Chinese primary sources for decades . . . A clear-eyed and detailed account’ Observer
£12.99
C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China
To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilisation defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium - a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the iron grip of dependence. But, as this new edition of Narcotic Culture brilliantly shows, the real scandal in Chinese history was not the expansion of the drug trade by Britain in the early nineteenth century, but rather the failure of the British to grasp the consequences of prohibition. They reveal that opium actually had few harmful effects on either health or longevity; in fact, it was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with inbuilt constraints preventing excessive use. Opium was even used as a medicinal panacea in China before the availability of aspirin and penicillin. But as a result of the British effort to eradicate opium, the Chinese turned from the relatively benign use of that drug to heroin, morphine, cocaine, and countless other psychoactive substances. The transition from a tolerated opium culture to a system of prohibition produced a 'cure' that was far worse than the disease. Delving into a history of drugs and their abuses, Narcotic Culture is part revisionist history of imperial and twentieth-century Britain and part sobering portrait of the dangers of prohibition.
£19.99