Frank Dikotter: The biographer as assassin

Dikotter, the author of a devastating trilogy on Mao's rule, says that the current leadership in China equates 'democracy' with the chaos of the Cultural Revolution

The process of de-Stalinisation that began within a couple years of Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 made Mao Zedong suddenly insecure about his own legacy in China. In a bizarre example of the law of unintended consequences, Nikita Khrushchev’s rolling back of Stalin’s extreme policies and his attack on the cult of personality in Russia made Mao nervous. In the modern Chinese historian Frank Dikotter’s telling, Mao’s paranoia prompted by de-Stalinisation led eventually to the Cultural Revolution, an anarchic purge of the Communist Party. Mao had already been facing internal dissent in the mid 1950s when the party congress of 1955 deleted ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ from the constitution. More than six years later, after Mao’s demented Great Leap Forward had resulted in famine and cost tens of millions of lives, Mao used the Cultural Revolution to deflect the criticism he was facing. As he put it, “We must punish this party of ours.” This was “an old man”, writes Dikotter, “settling personal scores at the end of his life” with a total disregard for human suffering.

Minutes after Dikotter and I have disposed of ordering from the rich offerings on the set menu at the creative French restaurant Seasons in Hong Kong — Wagyu beef tartare as a main course for Dikotter, a roast chicken likely weaned on butter for me — the professor of history at the University of Hong Kong is recounting how Mao responded as Khrushchev, whom he disliked intensely, asserted his control over the Soviet Union. “Mao felt he had led a quarter of humanity to Communist Revolution, not Khrushchev,” says Dikotter. “Mao realised he might not spot the critic (among the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party)... so he let the people decide. He thrived on chaos. It meant no one had time to plot against (him).”

With China’s president Xi Jinping having in March elevated himself to president for life and ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ now paired with Mao’s mumbo-jumbo as Communist ideology despite the thuggish reality of China’s totalitarian, robber-baron capitalism, this could not be a better time to meet Dikotter. Xi’s campaign against his party rivals is more dignified than Mao’s was, but we are seeing a colourised replay of an old movie, thankfully minus the state-sponsored gang violence of Mao’s China. This month’s installment involved the show trial confession by Sun Zhengcai, the former party chief of Chongqing. Accused of corruption, his main fault appeared to be that he was once widely regarded as a successor to Xi.

The Cultural Revolution continues to hang over contemporary China. The odd phrasing used by ordinary Chinese and the party alike to describe Mao’s rule — “70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad” — was a formulation thought up by Mao to push back against Khrushchev’s debunking of Stalin’s rule, Dikotter tells me. The precision and origins of that near-unanimous assessment of Mao always baffled me. Mao pronounced the Russian dictator’s policies to be “70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad.” When Mao died, his successors tried to draw a circle around those tumultuous years without denouncing him. “They use Mao’s verdict of Stalin and apply it to him,” says Dikotter, guffawing. “It’s very ironic. It’s very ironic.”

Mao had the last laugh. President Richard Nixon would pay a famous visit to China in 1972, prompting Mao to chortle that the US was “changing from monkey to man (but) the tail is still there”. Today, Mao’s giant image presides over Tiananmen Square, while contemporary styled Chinese restaurants and retailers cavalierly use his portraits in a manner that no one would dare with Adolf Hitler. And, not even Deng Xiaoping, widely (though in Dikotter’s estimation mistakenly) credited with liberalising China’s economy, occupies a similar position in the Communist pantheon. “He succeeds well beyond Stalin. There is no deMaoification,” Dikotter says. “China suffers a collective amnesia.”

This moment early in our lunch is Dikotter distilled. His trilogy on Mao’s China — Mao’s Great Famine, The Tragedy of Liberation and The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History — is meticulously researched, using archival reports from relatively minor provincial leaders and common people participating in or coping with the trauma of mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward and endless mind games during the Cultural Revolution. “When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village (during the famine), local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury his son alive,” Dikotter reports in his book on the Cultural Revolution. “The man died of grief a few days later.” Dikotter is a subaltern historian on China, using such anecdotes and the voices of villagers and workers to metaphorically tear down the haloed hegemony over the historical narrative that the Chinese Communist Party enjoys. But, coupled with that serious ambition is Dikotter’s delight at the comedy of Communist communiques and the melodrama of regime intrigue. Both qualities make him a delightful lunch companion. When the first course arrives — his is a slow cooked Japanese egg sitting on a beef cheek confit and Parmesan emulsion — Dikotter gleefully exclaims it “a work of art”.

We had started lunch discussing the book Dikotter had just finished writing. It is a compendium of the world’s most murderous dictators, from Hitler and Stalin to Mengistu in Ethiopia to Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Dikotter’s first principle of dictatorial rule is “Every dictatorship ultimately pretends to be democratic.” The corollaries are: “By forcing people to acclaim you, you create an illusion of popular support… a cult of personality turns everyone into a sycophant.” Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, ensured that radios, the propaganda tool of yesteryear akin to social media today, “were sold below the cost of production”. He lets slip the interesting fact that Marxism was taken out of the North Korean constitution decades ago.

Dikotter is dismissive of those Sinologists who over the past couple of decades argued China was on a path to greater democratisation. That speculation was akin to “a soap opera”. Less than a decade ago, seasoned observers even argued that the role of President Xi’s father in liberalising the economy of Guangdong in the 1980s somehow meant that his son might push for a more liberal China. Instead, Xi’s regime has detained practically every leading human rights lawyer in China and snuffed out the occasional satire that once was permitted on social media. “I didn’t buy it for a minute,” says Dikotter of that earlier optimism. He argues instead that Xi’s being a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao had encouraged the young to put up large-character posters denouncing party leaders, shaped his worldview. (Witnessing his father demoted from being a senior party leader to the post of deputy manager of a tractor factory was likely traumatic.) From the decision to open fire on students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 to the current round-up of virtually all critics of the regime, that recollection of uncivil liberties running amok has animated the Chinese leadership’s paranoia: “What the Communist Party understands as ‘democracy’ is the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.”

Before our desserts arrive, we move to the terrace to enjoy the afternoon sun. Dikotter turns optimistic, pointing to rising living standards around the world and the world’s broad acceptance of the equality of races. He has little time for the argument that democracy is on its last legs because illiberal yet wildly popular rulers dominate the headlines in places such as the US, Hungary, Turkey and India. He points out that dissent is alive and well in the US, for instance. “Find me some good news in the newspapers about (Donald) Trump,” he asks rhetorically. “Dictatorship is a boot in the face forever and ever.”