Cornell University Lecture

The 12th Lecture | “Unmasking the CCP: History, Politics, and Society in Post-1949 China” Lecture Series

Title: Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity

Speaker: Professor Frank Dikötter (Stanford University)

About the Lecture

Frank Dikötter, the featured speaker of the Cornell University Lecture, is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, a Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a leading historian of modern China, authoritarianism, and political violence. Drawing on themes from his most recent book, Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, Dikötter will reassess the rise of the Chinese Communist Party from its founding in 1921 to its seizure of power in 1949, with particular attention to political violence, propaganda, Soviet support, and grassroots coercion, as well as the ways in which these forces shaped revolutionary legitimacy and the establishment of Communist rule in China.

About Professor Frank Dikotter

Professor Frank Dikötter is the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the most widely read living historian of modern China, with books translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of The People’s Trilogy, which includes Mao’s Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013), and The Cultural Revolution (2016).

Born in the Netherlands, Dikötter was educated in Switzerland and graduated from the University of Geneva in 1985 with honors in history and Russian. He then spent two years in the People’s Republic of China and three years later obtained a PhD in history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He published a revised version of his dissertation as The Discourse of Race in Modern China with Stanford University Press (1992). He spent close to twenty years at SOAS, recasting the history of Republican China in a series of five research monographs that culminated in the long essay China before Mao: The Age of Openness (2005).

In 2006, Dikötter moved to Asia to join the University of Hong Kong. There he was the first—and apparently only—foreigner to systematically use a whole range of archives of the Communist Party of China, using thousands of files to document the fate of ordinary people under Mao in The People’s Trilogy. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe covered a man-made disaster that led to the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. In 2011 the book obtained the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. It was followed by The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957 and The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976.

Dikötter’s other more recent books include How to be a Dictator (2019), with chapters on eight dictators from Mussolini to Mengistu, China after Mao (2022), a sequel to the trilogy, which showed how the forty years known as “Reform and Opening Up” from 1978 onwards were instead a concerted effort to reinforce the party’s monopoly over power and its control over the commanding heights of the economy, in explicitly Marxist-Leninist fashion.

Dikötter joined the Hoover Institution as adjunct in 2017 and was named Milias Senior Fellow on a full-time basis in 2025. He has an honorary doctorate from Leiden University.

This event is co-sponsored by: The Dean's Office of the College of Arts & Sciences, The Department of History, The Office of the Dean of Faculty, The Einaudi Center, The East Asia Program, and Cornell Center for Social Sciences.

*Please register for the event here: https://forms.gle/8CThemHjeZT1KjW79