Chinese Whispers

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 378

Price: Rs 699

The most interesting fact about Frank Dikötters latest book is that it is available in bookstores in China,where it has been described as a fabrication. Dikötter has acknowledged this as a compliment. That gives us a sense of the politics that constitutes the backdrop against which the Maoist period is being assessed,globally and within China. But more on that later.

It is necessary to first understand the challenge one faces in reviewing this book if one agrees with Dikötter,the review is superfluous,and if one disagrees,one is mischievous or an apologist. This prequel to his Maos Great Famine: The History of Chinas Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-1962,which won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011,aims to convincingly establish that the Chinese revolution/liberation was first and foremost a history of calculated terror and systematic violence.

Using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches,and armed with freshly declassified archives from the Chinese provinces maintained by Communist Party officials,in addition to unexpurgated versions of important speeches by leaders,secret police reports,confessions,personal memoirs and eyewitness accounts,Dikötter takes the reader from the siege of Changchun by the Peoples Liberation Army strategist Lin Biao the last and most decisive battle between the Communists and Nationalists in 1948 through the land reforms,the thought reform campaigns and the collectivisation of agriculture to the Hundred Flowers Movement,culminating in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. It is a veritable trail of blood. Without let-up or pause,the reader is subjected to one horror story after another violence,torture,cruelty unleashed by the Party,and,worst of all,ordinary people being made complicit to the violence.

Dikötter aims to show that Mao Zedong was responsible for it all. Like his earlier book,this one too provides no context,historical or cultural. For a century before the Communists came to prominence,there were upheavals,wars and exploitation. The Communist Party led by Mao successfully repelled colonialism and despite being the underdog,scored decisive victories against Japan and then the Chiang Kai-shek regime backed by the US and the USSR. This was war bitter,fierce and to the finish and the revolutionary struggle was no dinner party either. China under Maos leadership decisively aligned with the Soviet Union against the capitalist bloc and embarked on the task of socialist industrialisation and modernisation under conditions of scarcity and backwardness,a process which has come under scrutiny by many scholars. Many accounts not all by apologists have critiqued the human cost and there can be no argument against examining the record of post-1949 Peoples Republic of China.

But in Dikötters retrospective account,everything is reduced to cynical manipulation by the Party. The single and dare one say simple-minded objective of demolishing Maos revolutionary credentials and the Communist Party reduces the research to a compilation of ghastly stories. Maos decision to intervene in the Korean War,a qualitatively different episode on account of the strategic and geopolitical circumstances the nuclear threat from the US,the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits,gets short shrift in Dikötters rendition,only adding to the tally of Communist atrocities.

Dikötter does not offer any explanation of his methodology,or how he computes numbers,often from descriptive records,to arrive at his approximate total. Neither does he generally offer graphical or tabular data by province or locality,as he does on page 269,where he provides a table showing the average annual consumption and living space for workers in Wuhan in 1953-57. His approach to statistics at times borders on the bizarre after providing two different figures on suicides by counter-revolutionaries,he expresses his preference for the higher number since it derives from someone who knew better.

Dikötter is disinterested in nuances or even in asking whether brute force and terror were sufficient to keep the people not just subjugated but loyal too. He is not even aware of the immense irony when he says towards the end,The key to understanding the appeal of communism,despite the grim reality on the ground,lay in the fact that it allowed so many followers to believe that they were participants in an historical process of transformation,contributing to something much bigger and better than themselves,or anything that had come before. And that something was going right somewhere as well; dozens of recent studies and again,they are not all by apologists testify that the foundations of Chinas immense growth over the past three decades were laid in the earlier era.

By the time the Cultural Revolution had come and gone,the process to critically assess the Mao period had gotten underway in China earnestly. It helped that the new leadership under Deng Xiaoping had started the good Mao-bad Mao reassessment by providing a neat 70 to 30 per cent ratio. But that was way back in 1982,much before China had come to very nearly the centre of the global capitalist economy. Ansley J. Coale 1984 and Judith Banisters 1987 works had brought forth startling statistics about the death toll in the Great Leap Forward as high as 30 million. Many more books followed but,collectively,such narratives do not appear to promote a better understanding of China in the West. They highlight the continuing inability to think beyond binaries authoritarianism vs democracy,communism vs capitalism,free world vs those behind curtains of one sort or the other. The tendency to easily accept as gospel all that Dikötter offers would inevitably diminish the need to question and critique what really happened. Since the time the book appeared,the response,particularly from mainstream Western media and scholars,may be described as one collective gasp of horror at the idea of tens of millions of deaths as irrefutable reality with a few notable exceptions.

Dikötters work is a powerful addition to the counter-narrative of the Maoist period. It needs to be taken seriously and refuted seriously. A rigorous and detailed critique of the kind that Joseph Ball or Utsa Patnaik had provided of the methodology and calculation of the famine deaths during the Great Leap Forward is needed to uncover the lacunae and problems in the way the archival records at the local level have been extrapolated to make generalisations and judgements about the provincial and national levels. Objective scholars need to separate fact from fiction and certitude from conjecture. The jury is still out.

Alka Acharya is professor of Chinese Studies,JNU