“In history,” the late historian Paul Johnson memorably observed, “there are no inevitabilities.” Johnson’s adage holds true with the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, communism emerged triumphant, securing control over nearly a quarter of the world’s population. But as Frank Dikotter highlights in his new book, Red Dawn Over China, the victory of Mao Zedong and his followers was far from guaranteed.

Indeed, the majority of Chinese weren’t communists — far from it, in fact. In 1929, in the industrial city of Wuxi, north of Shanghai, the Party had a mere 25 members out of a population of 100,000. In 1927, the province of Zhejiang, with a population of 20 million, had no more than 2,600 members. As Dikotter observes, “almost every European country, with the exception of Nazi Germany, boasted a larger number of Communists as a proportion of their population than any province in China.”

Even if one were to rely on the inflated figures provided by the Comintern (the Communist International set up in 1919 by the Soviets to spread communism), only one person in 1,700 was a supporter. This level, Dikotter notes, “was roughly equivalent to Communist membership in the United States, a country not generally considered a leader in the world Communist movement.”

Small wonder then that a U.S. military attache traveling the Chinese countryside in 1934 declared that “a belief in a danger from communism in China is not warranted by the facts.” And the territory then under communist sway was far from ideal. “Today........

© Washington Examiner