Book description
Winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2011
Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked,
starved or beaten to death.
Mao
Zedong threw his country
into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an
attempt to catch
up with and overtake the Western world in less than
fifteen
years. It lead to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has
ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within
Chinese
archives brings together for the first time what
happened in the
corridors of power with the everyday experiences
of ordinary people,
giving voice to the dead and
disenfranchised. This groundbreaking
account definitively
recasts the history of the People's Republic of
China.
 Gripping ... Prof Dikötter's painstaking analysis of the archives
shows Mao's regime resulted in the greatest "man-made famine"
the world has ever seen'
Frank Dikötter is Chair
Professor of Humanities at the University of
Hong Kong and
Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a key
proponent of studying the history of China in global
perspective, and
has published a series of innovative books,
from his classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Univ.
Stanford Press 1992) to the controversial Narcotic Culture: A
History of Drugs in China (Univ. Chicago Press 2004). He lives
in Hong Kong.
