Frank Dikötter

In China After Mao, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter explores how the People's Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today.

His account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, from the secret minutes of top party meetings to confidential bank reports. Unfolding with great narrative sweep, this riveting, richly detailed chronicle recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers celebrate as an economic miracle.

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. It lead to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.