Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity
By Frank Dikötter
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026, 384 pages, $26
Dutch historian and Hoover Institution fellow Frank Dikötter has emerged as the contemporary West’s best chronicler of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and in the process has exposed some of the tragic failures of U.S. policy toward China, especially during the crucial years of China’s Civil War between 1945 and 1949. Dikötter’s new book Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity explores the history of the CCP’s climb to power, from its establishment by the Soviet-controlled Comintern in 1921 to the internal struggle for power within China against the Nationalists and several warlords in the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s, culminating in its victory over the Nationalists in the civil war in October 1949. And it revives the old political question of the early 1950s: “Who lost China?”
Dikötter’s chronicle relies on hundreds of volumes of CCP documents from 1923 to 1949, Nationalist Party archives, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s personal papers, Russian documents on the Comintern’s work in China, and archives from the United States, Britain, and France. While Dikötter does not explicitly answer the question of who lost China, he shows that China’s victory resulted from a combination of the CCP’s ruthlessness in waging “unrestricted warfare,” the exhaustion and physical and economic devastation produced by Japan’s aggression in China, the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalists, crucial Soviet assistance to the CCP during the civil war, and the disastrous foreign policy of the Truman administration driven in part by sympathetic media treatment of the CCP, communist sympathizers and agents within the U.S. government, and naivete at the highest levels of the administration.
Marshall’s mission to China was an epic policy failure which, when combined with the on-again, off-again U.S. aid to the Nationalists, spelled victory for the CCP.
Soviet leader Josef Stalin played a key role in the CCP’s victory. Stalin kept his options open throughout the political jostling within China in the 1920s and 30s, sometimes courting Chiang and the Nationalists while simultaneously providing advice, direction, and aid to the CCP. Stalin’s goal was initially to steer Japan’s geopolitical ambitions away from the Soviet Union (the USSR and Japan fought a brief war in 1939) and after the war to facilitate a China ruled by the CCP and allied to the Soviet Union, and he achieved those goals through a combination of ruthlessness, cunning, deception, and skillful diplomacy.
Chinese leader Mao Zedong was Stalin’s equal when it came to ruthlessness, cunning and deception — never more so than during China’s war with Japan where Mao feigned unity with the Nationalists as part of a “popular front,” but did very little to aid the fight against the Japanese army. Instead, as Dikötter shows, Mao’s CCP and the Red Army positioned themselves to gain military and political advantages over the Nationalists after Japan’s defeat in World War II.
Yet, American journalists and writers, especially Edgar Snow and Theodore White, portrayed Mao and the CCP as agrarian small “d” democrats, while writing what Dikötter characterizes as “searing indictments” of Chiang’s government. Snow’s influential book Red Star Over China (1937) portrayed Mao as a great man and a man of destiny. Dikötter describes it as little more than communist propaganda. Meanwhile, White in his dispatches downplayed Mao’s communist ideology while emphasizing the corruption of the Nationalists.
CCP sympathizers and agents also infiltrated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Dikötter notes that U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace wrote glowingly about the Soviet Union and the CCP. American diplomat John Stewart Service and Colonel David Barrett, Dikötter writes, reported to Washington on the achievements of the CCP while “vociferously criticizing Chiang Kai-shek, his regime and their troops … as inept and unreliable.” Service, according to Dikötter, provided Philip Jaffe with top-secret documents on the Nationalists’ order of battle, which Jaffe passed on to Soviet intelligence agents. Dikötter quotes Service saying in 1999 that he wanted Mao to win the civil war.
The Roosevelt administration’s policy toward the end of World War II was to force Chiang’s Nationalists to form a coalition government with the CCP. After FDR’s death, Truman continued that policy, eventually sending Gen. George Marshall as a mediator to bring Mao and Chiang together. “Marshall,” Dikötter writes, “still believed that the Communists were not doctrinaire ideologists, but merely rural reformers who could help shape a democratic China.”
Marshall informed Chiang that U.S. financial and military assistance was tied to Chiang agreeing to a truce with the communists. Truman, like FDR before him, pressured Chiang to form a coalition government with the CCP — a recipe for political disaster in China. Marshall negotiated a ceasefire between the Nationalists and Communists, which provided ample time for the Red Army to “recondition their troops, recruit soldiers from the countryside and receive more training, advice and aid from Moscow.”
Marshall’s mission to China was an epic policy failure which, when combined with the on-again, off-again U.S. aid to the Nationalists, spelled victory for the CCP. As the communists renewed the civil war, the Truman administration imposed an arms embargo that lasted from late 1946 to mid-summer 1947. Meanwhile, Stalin’s aid to the CCP continued and increased.
Dikötter describes the ensuing military battles in which the communists waged “unrestricted warfare, devoid of any rules,” and battles of “relentless attrition” that resulted in the conquest of the mainland, forcing Chiang to flee to Formosa (Taiwan). On the battlefields of the Chinese Civil War, Mao’s Red Army prevailed, Dikötter writes, because it “excelled in a very traditional pursuit of power, prevailing over [its] opponents through the amoral application of military strategy, including every ancient tactic prescribed by Sun Tzu and the other great strategists of the past: feign, lie, deceive, retreat, hit, run, sabotage; view everything as a means to achieving the end.”
The consequences of the CCP’s victory are still with us today. In China, it resulted in the horrors of the Great Leap Forward which cost tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962 (which Dikötter wrote about in Mao’s Great Famine), and the terrors of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 (which Dikötter also wrote about in The Cultural Revolution). Internationally, China’s victory in the civil war produced over time a great power ideological and geopolitical rival that uses its version of “unrestricted warfare” in an effort to replace the United States as the preeminent world power.
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa:
