1961.11.30.–
Author of the “People’s Trilogy”, who used provincial party archives to put the Great Famine’s death toll at 45 million
A Dutch historian of modern China, author of The People's Trilogy, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize.
A Dutch historian who taught at SOAS in London before becoming a professor at the University of Hong Kong. Mao’s Great Famine (2010), drawing on provincial party archives opened in the 2000s, estimated that at least 45 million people died of hunger, violence and overwork during the Great Leap and argued that the famine was the result of state violence rather than natural disaster or planning error; it won the Samuel Johnson Prize. The Tragedy of Liberation (1949–1957) and The Cultural Revolution (1962–1976) completed the trilogy. His figures and interpretation are contested; other scholars put the famine’s toll between 15 and 36 million.
Also known as: Frank Dikotter
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 2006–Chair professor of humanities, University of Hong Kong
Related historical events
The Scholarly Controversy over the People's Trilogy
Dikötter's People's Trilogy draws on new archival material to describe the effects of Communist-led China on the lives of ordinary people in three volumes: Mao's Great Famine (2010), The Tragedy of Liberation (2013) and The Cultural Revolution (2016). Each volume drew a divided reception.
On Mao's Great Famine, Mao's biographer Philip Short wrote that "Dikötter's errors are strangely consistent. They all serve to strengthen his case against Mao and his fellow leaders", and said the book "set out to make the case for the prosecution, rather than providing balanced accounts" of its period. Felix Wemheuer, lecturer in Chinese history and politics at the University of Vienna, criticized the book's lack of explanation of local variations in destruction and death toll, its ignorance of Mao's efforts to deal with the problems, and the weakness of its arguments due to a political agenda to reduce Chinese Communism to terror. The social historian Anthony Garnaut said Dikötter's statistics fall short of academic best practice and that he neglected the plain wording of the archival document on which he hangs his case.
Criticism also concerned the level of analysis. The economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda called the book "more like a catalogue of anecdotes about atrocities than a sustained analytic argument", and noted that it failed to record that many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of earlier Chinese history. Andrew G. Walder held that Dikötter's high death estimate cannot be reconciled with age-specific population data. On The Cultural Revolution, Daniel Leese listed the lack of analysis and explanation of local examples, the absence of comprehensive analysis of causes and effects, the neglect of ideology's role in Mao Zedong's launching of the Cultural Revolution, and a lack of clarity between analytical concepts and party language. Fabio Lanza wrote that Dikötter repeatedly made controversial statements without sufficient evidence, while Ian Johnson, citing Dikötter's claim that literacy and public health declined under Mao, wrote of his lack of nuance and the absence of grounding for his contrarian views. Roderick MacFarquhar, by contrast, called Mao's Great Famine "pathbreaking ... a first-class piece of research".
Dikötter also answered his critics in public: a 2010 description of his work by Pankaj Mishra as "boldly and engagingly revisionist" led to a public dispute between the two, and when Brian DeMare criticized The Tragedy of Liberation for implying that landlords were a communist-invented fiction, Dikötter replied that his citation referred to DeMare's own dissertation.