Interviews | Politics | East Asia

The Roots of China’s Communist Revolution

Insights from Frank Dikötter

Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Frank Dikötter – senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity” (Bloomsbury 2026) – is the 503rd in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”

What are the roots of China’s communist revolution? 

For several generations, historians have been writing about the “roots” or “origins” of the communist revolution in China. When I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s, Lucien Bianco’s “Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949,” set the tone, listing an impressive array of social, economic and political factors, from “peasant misery” to “government corruption” and “imperialist oppression,” all of it without any reference to primary sources. The point of my book is that the Chinese Communist Party had very little popular appeal. Until 1940, several years after the Japanese forced the central government to retreat to the hinterland in a brutal, full-scale war of conquest, their party claimed fewer members than any European country as a proportion of the overall population, with the exception of Nazi Germany. Even by 1940, according to the inflated statistics of the Comintern, a mere 1 in 1,700 people was a Communist Party member in China, roughly equivalent to communist membership in the United States, a country not generally considered a leader in the world communist movement. 

Communism, in China, was brought to the population at the barrel of a gun. Similarly, one might ask what the roots of the communist revolution were in East Germany, Poland or Romania. Your readers know the answer: communism was imposed by the Soviet Union after the arrival of the Red Army in 1945. Similarly, the Red Army occupied all of Manchuria in August 1945, handing over the countryside of this strategically vital region to the Chinese Communists. In the following years, Moscow helped turn Mao Zedong’s ragtag army into a formidable fighting machine, even as the United States imposed an arms embargo on their wartime ally, the central government of the Republic of China.

What societal conditions were essential for the rise of communism in China? 

The Communists thrived in extreme conditions of distress. For many years, they themselves created these conditions through plunder and loot, but also by attracting further depredation on the part of the government troops sent to suppress them. After the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, they occupied large tracts of land vacated by the central government and ravaged by the Japanese occupying forces. But the key after 1945 was requisitions and compulsory recruitment in the countryside, at first in Manchuria, then elsewhere as the Communists began to prevail and moved south from the end of 1948 onwards.

Explain how the communist party institutionalized and inflicted violence on the Chinese population. 

The Communists always faced the same dilemma: they only managed to occupy impoverished parts of the countryside, where the villagers had already struggled to survive, but had to extract enough revenue to feed themselves and their troops. The result was increased poverty for all, leading the party to crank up the violence in order to force the local population to........

© The Diplomat