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The historian Frank Dikötter has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006, and is the author of the People’s Trilogy, a series of books documenting the development of communist China between 1949 and 1976. Born in the Netherlands and educated in Switzerland, he began his career at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he became Professor of the Modern History of China. His most recent book, China After Mao (2022) traces the development of modern China from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.

Q: When you set out to write your book on the Great Leap Forward, which was published in 2010, was it your intention to cover, as you have done in your last four books, the entire history of the CCP era? 

A: No. I have a few basic principles in mind when it comes to historical research. One principle is that primary sources must be primary and secondary sources must be secondary.

In other words, if I am unable to access sufficient sources to cover a particular topic, I’m not going to do it. And what I did with my PhD in 1990, and the following three books, was really access the libraries in the People’s Republic of China. I know this sounds slightly crazy, but at the time most of us really relied on what you could find in Cambridge or Harvard or Leiden University — or occasionally you would go to Taiwan. And the impression was very much that libraries in the People’s Republic that had been closed during the Cultural Revolution were not open. So that was my first attempt to get hold of more material. 

And then I noticed by the end of the 1990s that archives were very gradually opening up material on the Republican era. So I was in there like a ferret, wrote several books, including one on drugs and a big fat book on prisons, scoured through several provincial libraries, and as I was doing that I noticed, roundabout the years 2002-3, that you could occasionally get hold of material on post 1949.

So, I relocated to Hong Kong in 2006 and pretty much spent a decade going up and down to the mainland. In the beginning, all I wanted to do really was find enough material to write a book about daily life during the Mao era, but I discovered so much that I decided to focus on Mao’s Great Famine. My career has been nothing but driven by opportunism: I see an opportunity and I will seize it. 

After the Great Leap Forward book, I didn’t think I would be allowed to go back, but I was and wrote The Tragedy of Liberation, simply because I’d come across so much material. I never intended to write a trilogy. 

Now, when it comes to this particular book I was pretty convinced that it would be very hard to research. I went back in 2016 and at the time there was very much a dark cloud hanging over the Mao era.

Many of the files that I had consulted from 2006 onwards had been reclassified. I tried to find out how much I could get, and I noticed that when you present yourself as somebody who’s there to study China’s economic miracle — in other words, 40 years of glorious reform and opening up — things went rather well.

So then the question became: is this a book on the 1980s? All countries have a limit on the kind of archives you can access: in China it is a 30 year limit. This was 2016; can I read beyond 1986, I wondered?

And surprisingly enough I found several collections where I was able to consult material, not just all the way till 1998, but in a few cases up to 2002. There were even a number of documents from the banking sector up to 2008 relating to the financial crisis in the United States and its repercussions. So that convinced me that I could actually do this.

And then I spent three years, up till pretty much Covid, just collecting material. And this book is the result of it. So again, as good old Chairman Mao says, you have to be a guerilla fighter. You see an opportunity: you seize it.

What are the differences between regional archives in terms of securing access? And has it become more difficult during the Xi Jinping era?

I often get asked how I manage to access the archives. A child can access archives. All you need is a letter of introduction that says who you are and what it is that you would like to read.

Now access cannot be guaranteed in every single place across this very large country — that should not really come as a surprise. But ultimately there are plenty of county archives; municipal archives; provincial archives, which will provide material that can prompt reflection.

The quality of the material will vary from place to place, there’s no doubt about it. But let me reemphasize once again that it is no major feat of mine to go to archives. The best historians of the PRC are historians in the PRC. They are the ones who work tirelessly with archival material, and they’re the ones who are frequently, if not always, very brave in publishing or at least trying to publish material that is critical of the PRC and reflects the material that they have found in a truthful manner.

What is required, of course, is a little bit of work. If you are an armchair sinologist and you go to the Shanghai Archives just for a week, you will probably not find all that much. So you really have to do some work, as any historian of any country would do.

The quality of the material varies enormously from place to place, of course, and only occasionally you hit a gold mine. But you’re not going to hit a gold mine if you don’t try.

My personal way of doing things is that I have a plan A, B, and C. I turn up on a Sunday from Hong Kong and on Monday morning I’m in the archives. I can find out by midday whether or not, first of all, I have access to this place at all and secondly, whether there is enough material that warrants me sitting down and reading through it.

If the doors are closed and I’m told very nicely access is not possible, which is generally something you can find out right away – well then you just go to the airport and you get on a plane.

The quality of the material varies enormously from place to place, of course, and only occasionally you hit a gold mine. But you’re not going to hit a gold mine if you don’t try.

One of the things that will surprise people reading this book is that the authorities in China still let you in. Obviously you’re one of the most famous historians working on the People’s Republic, and your books are far from complimentary to the CCP. Have you encountered restrictions aimed at you specifically?

I have never had any problems. There are three ways in which the CCP might restrict access. One is through the central archives, which theoretically reach all the way down to even regional archives. Now, I could be banned, but that has never been the case. I’ve been back many times to archives, and I’ve also always made an effort to go to new places, and at no point has anyone ever pointed out that I am a persona non grata – quite the opposite. 

And secondly, there is of course the passport system: you can ban somebody from crossing the border. That has never happened to me. And thirdly, of course, you could have academics denounce you. That has happened. Yang Kuisong, a loyal party member and a historian of the PRC, was asked to go around the country to denounce me at party history departments which he did dutifully — but otherwise, I have never encountered any issues at all.

What other researchers do outside the PRC is really not my business. But it seems to me that there are all sorts of ways of justifying not going through the archives. One might say, for instance, that everything is classified, so it’s a waste of time. Or nobody can read anything, so why go? Or foreigners are not welcome, so why bother? Or if you publish anything critical you may not be able to return to the PRC? Or the people you know in China might get in trouble? There are endless excuses for going back to what I referred to earlier on as that sinological armchair. And I would say most of these excuses are somewhat lame. 

You covered, particularly with your books on the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, periods of Chinese history that are already notorious for the violence and loss of life that occurred. But you’ve obviously moved your focus to an era that is seen in a very different light, both in China and the West. You write about the framing of this era as ‘China’s economic miracle’ and take on the term in your book. Within this mythology, of course, Deng Xiaoping has a central role: he’s known as the ‘principal architect of reform and opening’, forging ahead in the face of factional dissent. I wonder if you could talk about how you would characterize Deng’s role in that period of 1978 to 1992?

Well, first of all, I should say that again I believe primary sources should be primary and secondary resources should be secondary. In other words, to phrase it slightly differently, I don’t really approach any of the research with a great number of preconceived ideas that circulate in secondary sources.

If I knew the answers, I wouldn’t be doing the research. So I really approach this with an open mind. And what I find sometimes surprises me. There is a link between the book on the Cultural Revolution and this one, China After Mao.

I talk specifically in one chapter in that book on the Cultural Revolution about what I called the ‘Silent Revolution’. What I found was that ordinary people in the countryside had started undermining the collective economy already from 1971 onwards. The moment that Lin Biao dies and the army is purged, ordinary villagers realize that the party’s clout has been somewhat undermined. So they start — not just a few of them, but large numbers of them — taking back their tools from the people’s communes. They occasionally even divide the land with the consent of local cadres, who themselves are utterly fed up with three decades of economic mismanagement. They operate underground factories; they open black markets. And of course that is precisely what happens after Deng Xiaoping comes to power.

We generally talk about the Third Plenum in December 1978 as a key turning point. And it is pointed out that Deng Xiaoping gives contract systems to the people’s communes, providing an incentive for them by allowing them to retain and dispose of any surplus produced over and above the procurement quota.

That’s supposed to have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But of course, this goes back to this silent revolution I mentioned in the book on the Cultural Revolution. People were not waiting for an invitation from above, and were already doing what they thought they should do in order to survive.

Now, here’s the key point. Deng Xiaoping makes it clear time and again in 1978, ‘79, ‘80, ‘81, that the collectivized economy is the backbone of the economy in the countryside. Time and again, there are campaigns that forbid people from cultivating the land on their own — but this is not what happens.

…the architects of economic reforms in this particular case are of course the people in the countryside, not Deng Xiaoping. All along the regime tries to catch up with what is actually happening on the ground.

People’s communes take these contracts, and hand them out to the villages. The villages hand them out to individual households. By 1981, a report from the Ministry of Agriculture says the collective economy has vanished. Over half of the land in a great number of provinces is cultivated by individual households who make all the decisions about what to plant and how to plant it.

So by 1982, two things happen. First, the people’s communes collapse against the very wishes of Deng Xiaoping, and then, secondly, the income of most people in the countryside has doubled. So the architects of economic reforms in this particular case are of course the people in the countryside, not Deng Xiaoping. All along the regime tries to catch up with what is actually happening on the ground. 

[Then-Premier] Zhao Ziyang, with Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, in 1984, takes the contract system from the countryside and applies it to state-owned enterprises. Such enterprises are allowed to retain and dispose of any products that they produce over and above agreed quotas. 

Double-digit growth follows in 1984-8. But the problem is that there is also double-digit inflation. It is not just rural enterprises, but also state enterprises that scramble for raw materials. Your village enterprise wishes to keep the timber to make furniture. Your state enterprise needs timber so that they can make furniture. So bit by bit, borders start appearing. Instead of a unified national economy, what appears really is a patchwork of independent fiefdoms, in which you can no longer move goods from one end of the country to another without having to go through a whole range of checkpoints.

The result is inflation. This is how it works: state enterprises want to acquire more raw materials, so they borrow more in anticipation of future inflation, thereby increasing the money supply. By 1988 inflation, according to Yang Shangkun, stands at 48 percent.

Now, that’s not the only thing that happens in 1984. Zhao Ziyang, again with the blessing of Deng Xiaoping, allows local branches of the central banks to make decisions about lending. This results in a buying spree, as local cadres have the political clout to force local banks to make more loans. Loans to build restaurants, new offices, import colour televisions from abroad. The result is that by 1988, the Agricultural Bank of China is pretty much bankrupt. It cannot pay the villagers who have contractually undertaken to make deliveries of grain and timber and cotton to the state.

The Agricultural Bank has to issue promissory notes: IOUs, in other words. Now, I don’t need to explain to you what happened in 1989: a hundred thousand soldiers, two-hundred tanks converged on the centre of Beijing. This has been portrayed all too often, and not entirely wrongly, as a student movement in favour of democracy — supported by very brave scholars and intellectuals like Liu Xiaobo, who will later be given the Nobel Prize. But of course, it’s much more than that. In a remote province like Gansu, a quarter of a million people from all walks of life demonstrate, and in the countryside people are up in arms.

What you have is a country on the edge of civil war, thanks to changes to the economic system which allow party members to exchange power for money, whilst people in the cities and countryside are the ones who must suffer inflation or get on with promissory notes.

So I would say that that is a spectacular failure of economic reform, except of course, if you think that suppressing your own people with tanks is a good idea. 

Obviously there’s a period of ‘rectification’ from 1989 when restrictions on the economy are tightened. Deng goes down to Shanghai in 1990 and ‘91 to bang the drum for faster opening, and then embarks on his Southern Tour of 1992, which is seen in CCP historiography as a glorious moment where China gets back on track. How would you characterise that moment in China’s history? 

After 1989, it very much looks as if the PRC is going to revert all the way back to its Maoist past. 

So Deng Xiaoping sets out on his Southern Tour and he breaks the deadlock. In January 1992 he travels all the way to Shenzhen, and comes up with an idea to relaunch what is now formally called reform and opening up. He puts it, I think, in a very pithy way: he says, ‘Capitalist tools in Socialist hands’.

And what he means by that is that China can attract more foreign capital — these are the capitalist tools, so to speak. But we have nothing to worry about because the means of production, the land capital, banks, labour, energy, raw materials all belong to the state.

So how does it work? What he suggests is that special development zones be set up and that land is exchanged for capital, and capital is used to build up infrastructure: and it works extremely well. There’s a huge boom in infrastructure, all around the country and in particular along the coast where foreigners invest. So I think Deng Xiaoping should be given credit for that.

The question really is how good a decision this was. It seems to me that the biggest losers after 1992 are people in the countryside. The raw materials and the funding that went towards the countryside in the early 1980s is entirely redirected towards state enterprises. 

Tens of millions of people in the countryside are unemployed and must now work as migrants in factories along the coast for next to nothing, without any protection — no right to unions, to be hired and fired at will. They send remittances back home and it may not be a surprise to you that, again in ‘92 and ‘93, many of these remittances are not paid out in cash, but in IOUs — those promissory notes that appeared in 1988.

Deng, having got what he wants in 1992, steps back and allows Jiang Zemin – now an enthusiast for the accelerated development Deng had been advocating for – to properly take charge. Can you talk about his role in the so-called ‘roaring 90s’? 

I think his role starts right away in July 1989 with the No. 7 directive from the Central Committee that revives the notion of ‘peaceful evolution’ which still preoccupies the party to this very day. If I had to put it in a nutshell, I would say that the architect of the China we know today is not Deng Xiaoping but Jiang Zemin.

I think that we have been fooled by very superficial impressions of a man who occasionally comes across as something of a buffoon. He likes to burst in song; he has a smattering of foreign languages; it’s rather easy to mock him. But this is a man who really has made all the key decisions. Let me remind you, it was the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who first formulated the notion of peaceful evolution in 1957; namely that you should help satellite states of the Soviet Union, like Poland and Hungary, to evolve peacefully towards democracy.

Mao seizes upon it and sees it, of course, as a very dangerous attempt by the ‘imperialist’ camp to infiltrate the regime and subvert power. The Cultural Revolution, to a significant extent, was an attempt by Mao to prevent China from ‘evolving peacefully’ and walking back on the road towards ‘capitalism’. The idea is relaunched by Jiang Zemin and remains a foremost concern among the leadership to this day: every couple of years, from 1989 onwards, there are warnings about ‘peaceful evolution’ and ‘infiltration’ or ’subversion’ by the ‘imperialist camp’.

Another significant move by him in 1992 is the purge of the military. After he opposes Yang Baibing and Yang Shangkun, whom he accuses of having broken party discipline, he undertakes the greatest reshuffle in the Army since 1949 by placing his own men in positions of power and across the government. So not exactly somebody who doesn’t know how to pursue corridor politics. 

In 1997 he introduces an extraordinarily important idea – ‘grab the big; let go of the small’; namely an attempt to address the huge number of underperforming state enterprises by amalgamating them into national champions: huge flagship conglomerates like China Telecom.

And these companies are the ones that shape the economy of the People’s Republic to this very day. Jiang Zemin is not only the one who proposes creating national champions like Huawei and China Telecom, but is also the one determined to list them on stock exchanges abroad with the help of a small army of foreign money makers and corporate lawyers, who ensure compliance with international finance and corporate law, and list them in Hong Kong, but also in New York. 

He also pursues the idea that it is not enough, as Deng Xiaoping suggested, that foreigners come to China and set up factories; China must ‘Go Out’ and set up factories abroad to ensure a steady supply of raw materials, whether it is oil coming from Turkmenistan or grain from Brazil. There’s a huge attempt to really make sure that the PRC can protect and ensure its supply of raw materials around the globe.

However you look at it, it is very much Jiang Zemin who has shaped the China we know today…

The last thing I wish to mention about Jiang Zemin and how he has shaped the China we know today is what foreigners at the time described as something wonderful — namely the right for private entrepreneurs to become party members. This was applauded by many around the world as a welcome opening up of the party ranks to the private sector. Unfortunately, it’s exactly the other way around. The policy is part of what is called the ‘Three Represents’. And the three represents are inscribed in the Constitution. What are the Three Represents? A determination to have the party represent and define the interests of all aspects of society, including the private sector. In other words, Jiang Zemin insists that every private enterprise should have a party cell, making sure that the party controls every aspect of the economy. And that policy is, of course, carried on by his successors Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.

However you look at it, it is very much Jiang Zemin who has shaped the China we know today: the giant flagship conglomerates; the grip that the party has on the private sector; the shift towards much greater support for state enterprises; the determined effort to ward off any attempts at so-called ‘peaceful evolution’. The list goes on. A remarkable man, if I may say so.

One of the things I find interesting about the post-Deng era is that there remains relatively little written about Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, when compared to the volume of material on Deng and Mao. Why is that, do you think?

Well, I don’t really know. I don’t spend too much time scrutinizing the secondary literature. But, several things come to mind. First of all, frequently there’s a preoccupation with the mere surface of things when it comes to China. In other words, very little attempt to actually read what is written or said by these people who are in positions of power.

I remember reading the ‘Four Cardinal Principles’, inscribed into the constitution, as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s. Once you have read them, it should be reasonably clear that this is not a regime keen to abandon the socialist way or move towards democracy. 

What I am trying to say is that there is a longstanding, widespread conviction that Chinese communism is not really communism at all. This conviction underpins the idea that if only you lend the communist party a hand, you can nudge it in the right direction, making sure that it will eventually democratize (or should I say evolve peacefully?).

Another widespread conviction, echoed in the secondary literature, is that Deng is the architect of economic reform. That, of course, is the official line, the regime’s own propaganda, and all too often Western historiography tends to closely follow PRC historiography. I would not want to name anyone, but there is no lack of foreign hagiographies of Deng; you can find translations in every airport in China.

Once you accept the party line which defines Deng as the architect of economic reform, then by definition, you are less interested in what happens under other leaders like Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao.

In the run up to the Party Congress, there’s been a lot of commentary on Xi’s ‘unprecedented third term’ and frequent comparisons to Mao. I wonder whether you think there are useful historical parallels for Xi’s current approach to leadership?

In a nutshell, the reason why the epilogue, which covers Xi Jinping from 2012 to now is so short is that an attentive reader will realize that by the time you reach the end of the book that Xi Jinping is an elaboration, not a departure, from a well-established and quite familiar playbook.

Xi introduced differences in degree, not in kind. When he insists that private enterprises should establish party cells, he harks back to a tradition started by Jiang Zemin in 2000. And the list goes on and on. I see it much more as a continuation. 

And from 1949 to this very day, none of these leaders – not a single one of them – has ever at any point talked in anything but negative terms about the separation of power. In other words, there is a widespread conviction on the part of a great many party leaders that the Leninist principle of a monopoly over power is absolutely right. 

…the goal of reform was to increase the control of the party over the commanding heights of the economy and not let go of it. In other words, the party does control capital. It does control energy. It does own the land. It’s never really let go of any of it. 

Surely now we can also see that the goal of reform was to increase the control of the party over the commanding heights of the economy and not let go of it. In other words, the party does control capital. It does control energy. It does own the land. It’s never really let go of any of it. 

What you think is the root cause of why your books have been so successful? 

I don’t think it’s all that difficult. I said this in 2010 in the Harvard bookshop when I gave a talk about Mao’s Great Famine. You can walk into this bookshop and you’ll find plenty of books about the Soviet Union. There are some great writers out there on the history of Soviet Union — Robert Service; Stephen Kotkin; Orlando Figes — all of them widely respected historians who write in clear prose devoid of academic jargon while basing themselves on first-rate primary sources.

But if you look under the history section for ‘China’ there is a lot less. Let’s take 1949, China’s equivalent of the October Revolution in 1917: surely this was a momentous event? But you will not find all that much. You would have to go back to Richard Walker’s China under Communism: The First Five Years, published in 1955. The book was critical, and as a result the author hounded out of the field in the United States by the dean of Chinese studies himself, John King Fairbank at Harvard University.

There is a real thirst for knowledge about the People’s Republic of China, but there simply is very little around, and what is around tends to be written in a very abstract, theoretical way. I think that is the key. And if I may say so – though I am Dutch and educated in Switzerland – I think that what sets so much of British historiography apart is clear prose based on meaningful sources.

It goes back to George Orwell: ‘writing should be as clear as a window pane’. Clear writing is the result of a clear mind. Obscure writing hides an obtuse mind.

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