Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today’s China and what the Chinese Communist Party’s choices mean for the rest of the world

A clear-eyed and detailed account … Dikötter has been mining Chinese primary sources for decades

A pulsating account that makes clear how important it is to look beneath the surface when it comes to any period or region in history – but above all to China

Dikötter’s highly-readable primer provides a valuable corrective … Helps puncture the image of China’s inexorable economic rise

A revolutionary book . . . Breaking with the bland orthodoxy peddled in some of our finest universities, Dikötter says that China today is a Leviathan where a party, fascist in all but name, controls society … Dikötter marshals a daunting array of statistics and documents . . . Historians such as Dikötter are there to warn

With China After Mao, Dikötter has told the story of the years after Mao’s death in 1976 until the arrival of President Xi . . . Dikötter, who writes with considerable verve, blasts several holes in the notion that a Marxist-Leninist system can ever bring real reform. The new dictator’s reign will not end well, any more than that of his hero. Poor China – a great civilisation suffering under Communist rule

[Dikötter] draws on official records that have not been widely available to look afresh at the history of the reform and opening period … Dikötter sees a party fixated on only one [goal]: keeping itself in power and market forces in check – a goal which, as he sets out in a wealth of detail, has remained consistent ever since

Offers a blow-by-blow account of the uneven, reactive and sometimes chaotic course of economic policies . . . China After Mao provides an important corrective to the conventional view of China’s rise through reform

I am a great fan of Frank Dikötter, and his wonderful China After Mao did not disappoint in its forensic coverage of the past five decades

Dikötter’s account is based on inside knowledge of the system both at its core and on the periphery … A compact account of the momentous changes in China since Mao. As in the ‘People’s Trilogy,’ he carefully amasses inside information and then passes decisive, and usually damning, judgment

It is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today’s China and what the Chinese Communist Party’s choices mean for the rest of the world

This is a historian’s view of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ and of the shadow that Mao continues to cast over Chine. China After Mao is comprehensive. Readers will find pre-echoes of the issues that dominate coverage of China . . . Dikötter masterfully blends the micro-level examples from archives with patient explanations of the economic policies and circumstances behind them and bigger picture narratives of the Chinese state. His wry observations and controlled anger contribute to rendering a complex subject very readable

PRAISE FOR THE PEOPLE’S TRILOGY: ‘A brilliant and powerful account …This excellent book is horrific but essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world’s most important revolutions

Powerful … Bold and startling … Dikötter must be admired for the manner in which he puts a human scale on the enormous barbarities of the communist takeover of China. We cannot begin to understand modern China without being aware of the blood-drenched tale Dikötter so ably relates

A mesmerizing account of the communist revolution in China, and the subsequent transformation of hundreds of millions of lives through violence, coercion and broken promises. The Chinese themselves suppress this history, but for anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading

Dikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order

A remarkable work of archival research. Dikötter rarely, if ever, allows the story of central government to dominate by merely reporting a top-down directive. Instead, he tracks down the grassroots impact of Communist policies … In so doing, he uncovers astonishing stories of party-led inhumanity and also popular resistance … Dikötter sustains a strong human dimension to the story by skillfully weaving individual voices through the length of the book

This groundbreaking book examines the bloodstained reality behind the word and reveals how it brought tragedy to millions … Dikötter’s achievement in this book is remarkable. He has mastered a mass of original source material, and has done so by mining local archives in China, which have yielded up a host of treasures.

Startling … Dikötter’s work has aimed to demolish almost every claim to truth or virtue the Chinese Communist party ever made. He combines a vivid eye for detail with a historian’s diligence in the archives. Powerful … Dikötter is unsparing in his account of the effects of the communist rule

Harrowing and brilliant … This is the book that changes your life

Magnificent … This brilliant book leaves no doubt that Mao almost ruined China and left a legacy of paranoia that still grips its modern dictatorship under the latest autocrat, Xi Jinping

Together, these three books, which Dikötter calls the ‘People’s Trilogy’, constitute a major contribution to scholarship on modern China, one that is unequalled, certainly in the English language … His patience and endurance must be considerable and his Chinese-language skills formidable … Revealing and rewarding reading – for specialists and non-specialists alike