Ever since Frank Dikötter's first book . . . this prolific star of China studies has challenged conventional truths and broached taboo subjects . . . Dikötter succeeds at bringing different strands together in a highly readable narrative that challenges the foundational myths of the CCP . . . A valuable reminder that today's China – the prosperous, technologically advanced superpower – is a country built on a foundation of violence . . . A tireless chronicler of the numerous crimes and follies of Chinese Communism, Dikötter once again shows his readers who was pulling the trigger of that gun

Sergey Radchenko, Financial Times

Frank Dikötter has rewritten the early history of the Chinese Communist Party from the ground up. Drawing on archival materials long thought inaccessible, he strips away decades of myth to reveal a story of improvisation, violence and opportunism. Written with precision and verve, Red Dawn Over China is the most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years

PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed

Animating . . . Mao's victory, he argues, owed little to popular enthusiasm and even less to the intrinsic appeal of communist ideas … His pages teem with arrests, purges, sieges, starvation and fear

Pratinav Anil, The Times

Dikötter makes his case clearly and unequivocally . . . Dikötter backs his case up with a deep body of primary sources including archival materials available only in restricted circulation, showcasing the assiduous research typical of this Dutch writer's work, which encompasses 13 books on the history of China . . . Does a service to historians and general readers in showing the receipts . . . Explains why rose-tinted or romantic views of the communist revolution urgently need revision . . . The violence at the centre of the party's project cannot be denied by historians, even if it is rarely mentioned in the party's narrative of its own rise . . . The moral anger at Red Dawn Over China's heart brooks no argument

Rana Mitter, New Statesman

Powerful, engrossing . . . Give[s] a voice to the untold millions of Chinese who were silenced by utopian Communist violence and repression . . . Dikötter functions as something like a one-man truth commission, relentlessly excavating horrors that took tens of millions of lives

Gary J. Bass,, New York Times Book Review

Frank Dikötter is an iconoclast historian who immerses himself in the primary sources more thoroughly than any other Western scholar of 20th-century China . . . [An] invaluable book

Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal