Soviet Power, Not Popular Support, Put Mao in Control of China

Frank Dikötter rejects the romantic account that has shaped much Western understanding of Mao’s rise: a small but deeply rooted movement, sustained by peasants, disciplined by sacrifice, and carried toward power by the moral force of revolutionary legitimacy. Drawing on Communist Party archival material and Russian sources, Dikötter reverses that causal story. The Chinese Communist Party was not, in his telling, a mass movement that attracted foreign attention because it was destined to win. It was a marginal organization repeatedly created, financed, rescued, armed, and redirected by Moscow, and it reached power only after war, Soviet intervention, and a civil-war strategy based on coercion and attrition.

The immediate target is Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. Peter Robinson begins with Snow’s quotation of Commander Peng, who described Communist partisan warfare as something that could win only by “implanting itself deeply in the hearts of the people,” “fulfilling the demands of the masses,” and “sheltering in the shadow of the masses.” Peng’s formulation ended with the line: “We are nothing but the fist of the people.”

Dikötter’s answer is blunt: “No.” He does not buy it.

Snow, he says, was invited by Mao for a clear reason: he was sympathetic. His interviews with Mao appeared in 1936, the book followed in 1937, and it was quickly translated into 20 languages. Before Snow, Dikötter says, few people outside China knew much about the Chinese Communists. After Snow, Mao became a household name. The book worked because it let the Communists tell their story “exactly the way they wanted it to be projected to the world,” while Snow “goes along with the whole thing.” Robinson calls it “totally unchallenged.” Dikötter agrees: “utterly unchallenged.”

Snow’s narrative was powerful because it had the structure of a morality play: Communist heroes in the hills; feudalism, capitalism, fascism, and foreign oppression as villains; Mao as liberator of the masses; the party as modern, emancipatory, and organically connected to millions. Dikötter says he read the book as an undergraduate, found it fascinating, and did not believe it. More importantly, he argues that Snow’s account became “more or less the official party line,” propagated widely after 1949, with small adjustments over time but the basic structure left intact.

The mismatch between legend and political reality is central to Dikötter’s argument. Modern accounts often treat the Nationalists and Communists of the 1920s and 1930s as roughly equivalent contenders, as if Chinese history were mainly a contest between two plausible national movements. The numbers, he says, make that framing untenable. In Portugal under Salazar in 1934, roughly one in 280 people was a Communist. In Finland, where the party was banned, one in 700 was a Communist. In Gansu province in 1939, which Dikötter describes as poor, rural, and by Marxist theory “ripe for revolution,” the figure was one in 25,000. Using Comintern figures from 1940, which he calls inflated, the proportion was one Communist in every 107,000 people — “the exact same proportion as in the United States of America.”

A summary from Red Dawn Over China, shown on screen and read by Robinson, gives the point in its starkest form: “Almost every European country, with the exception of Nazi Germany, boasted a larger number of Communists as a proportion of their overall population than any province in China.” Dikötter calls that “a pretty good summary.”

Frank Dikötter grounds his confidence in sources he says earlier historians either lacked or largely failed to use. For decades after 1949, outside scholars could not work normally in China. “The bamboo curtain comes down,” he says. No historian, archaeologist, or economist could simply enter the country, find a library, and work through archives. For “a good 50, 60 years,” historians of modern China relied heavily on material published by the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party after 1949 — selections of sources intended to propagate the party’s view.

The crucial opening, as Dikötter describes it, came from the party itself. In the 1980s, China’s central archives, controlled by the Central Committee, collected documents from provincial archives: “every bit of paper” produced by local Communist Party branches from 1923 to 1949. The result was a massive set of internal publications, produced roughly from 1981 to 1989. Dikötter describes them as neibu material, intended for internal circulation, comparable to the Soviet system of restricted library holdings known as Spetskhran. These books were not meant for public access or foreign historians. But they “found their way across the border into Hong Kong,” where Dikötter found them.

He is not simply offering a different interpretation of familiar evidence. He argues that the standard history rested on a narrow and compromised evidentiary base. A few historians, he says, have used a volume or two of the Chinese internal material, but “overall, very little of it has been read.” When Peter Robinson asks why more historians have not used these documents, Dikötter refuses to supply an explanation: “Go and ask them. It is not my problem.”

The Chinese archives alone are still insufficient. The history of the Chinese Communist Party from 1921 to 1949 cannot be understood, he argues, without Russian-language materials from the Comintern and its correspondence with the Chinese party. Those sources, he says, run to about five volumes of roughly 1,000 pages each. “If you don’t read Russian,” Dikötter says, “then quite frankly, you shouldn’t even try to do the history of modern China.” His reason is direct: Stalin appears on about 70 pages of his book because Stalin, not Mao, “sets the parameters.”

That is why Snow’s influence matters as more than literary mythmaking. A romantic book filled an evidentiary vacuum; the Communist Party later institutionalized much the same narrative; and historians who lacked access to, or did not use, the internal Chinese and Russian records ended up working within boundaries the party itself had helped establish.

Robinson quotes the late China hand Robert Marquand: “While history around the globe has been taken to task, queried, deconstructed and reconstructed, China’s triumphal version of its past remains quaintly untouched.” Dikötter’s project is presented as an answer to that condition: not a new theory laid over the old story, but a reconstruction from sources the party never intended as public propaganda.

Frank Dikötter says the Communist Party of China was established in 1921 with the help of Soviet advisers and Bolshevik agents, not by Mao as the later myth tends to imply. After the Communist International was founded in Moscow in 1919 with the explicit mission of overthrowing the international bourgeoisie and establishing communist regimes, Soviet agents arrived in China and began cultivating a tiny number of individuals. By 1920 or 1921, he says, those individuals could be counted “on the fingers of about two hands.”

The party remained “entirely irrelevant” until 1923, unable to attract more than a few dozen people. The important event of 1923 was not a surge of Communist appeal, but the formation of a united front with the Nationalists in Guangzhou. The Nationalists, then led by Sun Yat-sen and later by Chiang Kai-shek, wanted to unify China by force. Dikötter emphasizes that the Nationalists were “not sweethearts either.” They needed support, and Moscow offered weapons, money, and assistance — on the condition that Chinese Communists be admitted into the ranks of the Nationalist Party.

Dikötter calls the arrangement a “Trojan horse,” engineered by Comintern envoy Henk Sneevliet. Without Bolshevik agents such as Sneevliet and others, he says, “there would never have been anything.” By roughly 1925 onward, Stalin and his envoys were determining “every twist and turn” of the Communist Party in China and repeatedly saving Mao and his guerrilla fighters from annihilation by the Nationalists.

The Nationalists, in this telling, should not be treated as foreign capitalist proxies. Peter Robinson asks whether Chiang Kai-shek remained in some basic way connected to traditional Chinese civilization rather than seeking to impose Western values. Dikötter agrees. Chiang was no Communist from the beginning; he had gone to Moscow and quickly recognized that the Comintern intended to use his party for Soviet ends. What Chiang wanted, Dikötter says, was what most people wanted: “a reasonably stable, wealthy, independent nation.” His grave mistake was trying to impose unification “at the barrel of a gun from above.”

The Nationalist goal included abolishing the treaty-port system and foreign concessions that had emerged in the nineteenth century. Dikötter stresses that many of these “humiliations” were already being dismantled under Chiang. From 1927 onward, many concessions were surrendered or scheduled for return to the central government. Tariff autonomy was restored. “For all intents and purposes,” he says, the treaty-port system had already been abolished by 1933 — under Chiang Kai-shek, not Mao.

The split between Nationalists and Communists came in 1927. The Nationalist army, aided heavily by Soviet support and figures such as Mikhail Borodin, launched the Northern Expedition in 1926 and unified the south in 1927. But inside the Nationalist ranks, Communists were inciting mobs against landowners, rich merchants, gentry, and foreigners. By March 1927, foreigners were fleeing the Yangtze Valley toward Shanghai. On March 24, Dikötter says, Communist forces massacred a number of foreigners in Nanjing, burned buildings, and created an incident barely mentioned in many histories. Chiang concluded that the Communists were destroying his effort to unify the country and moved to expel them.

From there, the Communists were “out there in the wilderness.” They survived through plunder, seizing small county towns, executing local powerholders, recruiting men at gunpoint, and using seized money to buy weapons. Their weapons also came from the Soviet Union. From about 1930 or 1931, they established a few soviets in remote, mountainous, inhospitable areas along provincial borders. But those soviets were repeatedly encircled and often collapsed because, in Dikötter’s view, the Communists were unable to run an economy.

The Long March was not an epic proof of revolutionary legitimacy. Dikötter calls it “a long retreat and an absolute disaster.” Mao left with forces numbering just under 80,000 and arrived in the north a year later with about 6,000.

That was the moment when Snow arrived in Shaanxi and portrayed the survivors as heroes.

Frank Dikötter treats the Sino-Japanese War as another place where the heroic Communist account breaks down. The Japanese invasion in July 1937, he says, was ferocious and “really is the start of the Second World War.” But the Communists did not do very much fighting against Japan. He mentions one battle by Lin Biao in September 1937 but says it “doesn’t really amount to very much.”

A formulation from Red Dawn Over China, displayed on screen and read by Peter Robinson, states the asymmetry directly: “The Japanese Army would do what the Communists were not in a position to accomplish, namely attack, destroy or displace government troops from all major cities along the coast. The Communists, on the other hand, remained safely ensconced in the hinterland.”

Dikötter endorses Robinson’s paraphrase: Mao was inland, largely declining to engage Japan directly, while Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists took the full brunt of the Japanese attack down through Manchuria and along the coast. From 1937 to 1941, he says, the Communists received 75% to 90% of their funding from the Nationalist central government, plus funding from Stalin and Moscow. Their strategy was to wait for Japanese forces to displace the Nationalist central government, then move into positions behind the Japanese lines.

“In fact,” Dikötter says, “they are fighting the KMT.” He qualifies the point: not quite alongside the Japanese, but using the Japanese advance as an opportunity to displace the Nationalists. Robinson draws the implication: their real enemy was the Kuomintang, not Japan.

The tension is central. The party that later grounded its legitimacy in resistance to foreign invasion benefited militarily, in Dikötter’s account, from the destruction Japan inflicted on the recognized Chinese government. Its wartime position was not that of a national army bearing the principal cost of resistance, but of a Communist force preserving itself in the hinterland while its main Chinese rival was battered by the invader.

When asked how a small, unpopular, repeatedly rescued movement took control of the world’s most populous country in 1949, Frank Dikötter answers by analogy: why did East Germany become Communist? Because the Red Army arrived. The same was true, he says, of Romania and Hungary. The Red Army invaded half of Europe and stayed. In China, the equivalent was Manchuria.

In August 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and in accordance with prior understandings with the Americans, Stalin invaded Manchuria. Peter Robinson notes that Manchuria was larger than Japan, roughly the size of two large European countries. Dikötter calls it wealthy in natural resources and the strategic gateway to the rest of China. Whoever had Manchuria had a route through the Great Wall and into China proper.

The Soviet Union did not simply pass through, according to Dikötter. It occupied Manchuria until May 1946 and turned it over to the Chinese Communists. During that period, he says, the Soviets helped transform a “ragtag army of guerrilla fighters” into a formidable fighting machine. Sixteen military academies were established. Some soldiers were sent to Moscow for advanced training. Trainloads of material arrived from North Korea and Siberia. Boats delivered weapons.

The American role, as Dikötter presents it, compounded the problem. He traces it to Henry Wallace’s 1943 visit. Wallace first went to Siberia, visited what Dikötter calls the Gulag at Magadan, and was deeply impressed. In Chongqing, Wallace told Chiang Kai-shek he should emulate the Soviet economic model in Siberia. Meanwhile, Stalin had told Wallace and U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman that the Chinese Communists were not real Communists — only “margarine communists,” agrarian reformers.

That line, Dikötter says, shaped American policy. George Marshall arrived in China in December 1945, sent by Truman to impose a coalition. In January 1946, Marshall imposed a truce and pressed the Nationalists and Communists toward a coalition. The Communists violated the truce the same day they signed it, attacking Nationalist forces at Yingkou, a port in Manchuria.

Four months later, after the Soviets left Manchuria, the Nationalist government moved north along the railways and began defeating the Communists. Lin Biao was forced to retreat toward Harbin and, in Dikötter’s view, might have been pushed out of China into Siberia. Marshall again insisted on a truce. Then, in September 1946, even as the Soviets were arming the Communists, Marshall imposed an arms embargo on the Nationalists that lasted roughly a year. Dikötter says the Nationalists had to fight “with their hands bound behind their back.”

Marshall’s own aide, Alan Gillem, warned him that the Communists were repeatedly breaching agreements, truces, and coalition commitments. Dikötter says Gillem was correct. Marshall, however, dismissed the concern: he had seen the Communists and believed they were not real Communists.

The long-running American question “Who lost China?” is framed here less as a story of Communist infiltration than of American naïveté. Dikötter agrees that naïveté was central, though he adds that there were spies. As an example, he says John Service, who was sent to Yan’an in 1944, later admitted to British journalist Jonathan Mirsky that he had given an order of battle to a spy working for the Kremlin and Mao. The allegation is Dikötter’s, offered in the interview as part of a broader account of American misreading and Soviet advantage.

Still, the emphasis remains on misjudgment. The British, Dikötter says, understood something Americans did not: one cannot force two armed and unwilling parties into coalition. The Greek example had already shown that such coalitions could collapse into brutal civil war. In China, the United States pressed Chiang into exactly the kind of arrangement Stalin had long wanted, and did so at no cost to Stalin.

Frank Dikötter does not explain the Communist victory simply as Soviet assistance and American error. He also emphasizes Communist willingness to wage a kind of war the Nationalists could not defeat: “fire, famine and sword.” A passage from Red Dawn Over China, shown on screen, gives the logic: “Attrition gradually emerged as the key approach, as the Communists showed greater determination than the government to wage a war of fire, famine and sword.”

The meaning of that approach becomes clearer in Dikötter’s example of Changchun, a city in Manchuria besieged in 1948. He describes Lin Biao building a perimeter around the city with barricades, trenches four meters deep, barbed wire, and a sentry every 50 meters. Dikötter says Lin ordered the city to be starved into surrender: “let Changchun starve into surrender.” In the transcript, Dikötter’s stated figure is that “160 ordinary civilians” were trapped and died of hunger.

For Dikötter, Changchun helps explain why cities began to fall. Another passage from Red Dawn Over China says: “Cities began to topple, their leaders fearful of the consequences of resistance against the Communists. Throughout the civil war millions of refugees tried to escape, pouring into government-occupied territory. No one ever witnessed people fleeing toward Communist-controlled areas.”

The refugee pattern matters because it cuts against the claim that the Communists were being welcomed as liberators. People fled toward the Nationalists, not toward Communist-controlled territory. But mayors and local leaders could see what resistance might bring: siege, starvation, and civilian death. Peter Robinson puts it simply: if you are the mayor of Beijing and see refugees emerging from Manchuria after one besieged city after another, you say, “Let’s cut a deal.” Dikötter agrees: “Is this worth it? Probably not.”

Dikötter also stresses the asymmetry of tasks. The Nationalist government had to reconstruct a country the size of Europe after a devastating war while fighting an insurgent enemy. The Communists’ task was narrower: sabotage reconstruction and handicap the central government. Blowing up railways or cutting telegraph poles could be enough. The Nationalists were responsible for governing rubble; the Communists could focus on making that government fail.

Peter Robinson turns from Mao’s rise to present-day China by posing a moral and political question: can a country bury a monstrous past and move on? He contrasts the People’s Republic’s refusal to examine its own history with Germany’s postwar reckoning. Modern China, in Robinson’s framing, has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, developed a large middle class, produced wealthy entrepreneurs, and built firms such as electric-vehicle companies that compete globally. Xi Jinping appears in business attire and speaks the language of coexistence. Yet the regime still will not permit an honest account of its own origins.

Frank Dikötter answers that “the past will always come back and bite you.” He rejects the surface image of stable prosperity as sufficient. He cites former premier Li Keqiang’s statement that some 600 million Chinese lived on less than $140 a month. He also says that of 500 electric-car companies, 400 went bankrupt between 2018 and 2024. The larger point is not that China has achieved nothing; Dikötter acknowledges money, talent, and real achievements. It is that the regime’s projection of success operates within the same political system that once staged model prisons, model schools, and model farms for foreign journalists in Yan’an.

In Yan’an in 1944 and 1945, he says, American journalists saw a carefully prepared image. Mao advanced a policy called “the New Democracy,” promising respect for property, opposition parties, and real democracy in contrast to what he denounced as Chiang Kai-shek’s fascism. Dikötter sees continuity between that performance and modern Chinese propaganda: vast sums spent projecting prosperity, endless claims of achievement, and an inability to examine the past.

“If you are in it,” he says, “you can actually never examine your own past. You’re basically trapped.” The result is enforced amnesia, and from that amnesia, he argues, the same mistakes recur.

Robinson offers Chinese higher education as a counterexample by quoting on-screen excerpts from The New York Times. The headline reads, “Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip.” A displayed excerpt says that in the early 2000s, seven American schools would have been in the top 10 by a ranking based on scientific output, led by Harvard, while only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would have made the top 25. The excerpt continues: “Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.”

Dikötter is dismissive of the rankings as a measure of intellectual greatness. He says people inside the PRC laugh at such statistics. China has poured large sums into higher education and hired top talent from abroad, including from the United States and Europe. There are many achievements. But he asks what the pursuit of knowledge can mean in a country where one cannot compare the leader to Winnie the Pooh, where Orwell’s 1984 is forbidden, where ordinary newspapers including the New York Times are blocked, and where only a small number of journalists report from inside the country.

Robinson proposes “Dikötter’s Law”: no country can produce genuinely great universities if academics are not free to tell the truth about the country’s own past. Dikötter accepts the systemic point. A one-party state can achieve particular state-directed goals: airports, high-speed rail, electric cars, visible infrastructure. The Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy also had impressive showcases. If such a regime decides it must excel at making electric cars, it may succeed. If it insists it must lead in AI, Dikötter says, it will probably not succeed, though it may look as if it is doing well because of the resources poured in. The constraint is systemic: the system does not allow constant innovation from unexpected places, including the proverbial garage.

Taiwan represents both a historical counterpoint and a present strategic test. Peter Robinson summarizes the island’s path after Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 retreat as “dictatorship, economic freedom, democracy.” The Nationalist regime was dictatorial and often harsh, including toward the native population. Today, Robinson says, Taiwan is a genuine democracy, with freedom of the press, vigorous elections, and an economy known for high-value semiconductor production. Frank Dikötter agrees with the political description.

The strategic case comes through documents and quotations Robinson puts on screen. A displayed excerpt from the November 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy says Taiwan matters partly because of “Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production,” but “mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters.” The same on-screen document says one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, making a Taiwan conflict consequential for the U.S. economy, and adds: “We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.”

Another displayed quotation, attributed on screen to China expert Michael D. Swaine, says past National Security Strategy documents treated a Taiwan conflict as a threat to regional peace and stability, while the new strategy “for the first time strongly implies” that Chinese control of Taiwan, whether achieved peacefully or through war, would threaten U.S. interests.

Dikötter’s prescription is direct: a good move in Ukraine would have been to arm it to the teeth; a good move with Taiwan is to arm it to the teeth. “Taiwan is essential. Absolutely essential.”

He is equally unwilling to take comfort from Xi Jinping’s purges of the military. Robinson shows a New York Times headline, “Xi’s Purge of China’s Military Brings Its Top General Down,” concerning General Zhang Youxia, described in the on-screen text as second only to Xi in the military hierarchy and, according to the displayed excerpt, once seen as a confidant whose father knew Xi’s father in the Mao years.

Dikötter notes that China’s Central Military Commission has seven members: Xi and six others. At the time of the discussion, he says, five of the six others were gone.

The official or sympathetic explanation is anti-corruption. Dikötter treats that as the standard pretext in Communist systems. Mao began “stamping out corruption” in 1950, after only a year in power. In a one-party state, with no free press, no free unions, and no free opposition parties, corruption cannot be independently exposed or adjudicated. In effect, Dikötter says, every party member is corrupt, including the leader and his family. Anti-corruption campaigns become a way to remove real or imagined enemies.

The logic is preventive terror: better to eliminate a hundred innocent people than let one enemy go undetected. Xi has been in charge since about 2012; by 2026, after fourteen years, he still cannot trust the highest military team he himself put in place. That says something about Xi and about the system.

That instability is not, for Dikötter, a reason to relax about Taiwan. “Never,” he says. “These people are absolutely relentless.”

Frank Dikötter’s view of Xi Jinping is not that of a detached great-power realist merely playing a nineteenth-century game. Peter Robinson suggests that Xi has traveled, shaken hands with American presidents, and seen enough of the outside world to understand it. Dikötter rejects the premise. He says many of the people in charge are “caveman Marxists,” including those running Hong Kong: barely able to speak foreign languages, barely traveled, and barely aware of the deep differences between Communist systems and the rest of the world.

He contrasts this with the 1930s, when the Nationalist central government was, in his account, extraordinarily open. Americans visiting China then said more people in China spoke good English than in continental Europe. That is not the China of today, he argues. The current system is one in which everyone must watch his back. Xi must watch his back “in particular.” Dikötter points again to the military purges: if Xi does not trust five of the six other members of the military commission, why assume he trusts other committees? “You cannot approach him without going through a metal detector. He doesn’t trust anyone.”

The problem, again, is systemic. Xi grew up in a system convinced that an imperialist, capitalist camp is profoundly wicked and out to get the Chinese Communist Party. Dikötter says Xi is trapped inside that view. So are the people around him. Nobody can say anything openly.

Against China, Dikötter’s strategic prescription has three parts. The first is containment, or, as he puts it, “lock ’em in.” He emphasizes that the Chinese Communist system is already trying to limit knowledge from abroad, limit foreign presence in China, limit what outsiders can sell, and build self-reliance in anticipation of possible war with the “imperialist camp.”

The second principle is reciprocity: tit for tat. If China does not want American journalists, the United States should not want Chinese state journalists. If Beijing does one thing, Washington should respond in kind.

The third principle is psychological and political: “stand up.” Dikötter describes the regime as “a big bully that huffs and puffs.” Its aircraft carriers, economy, and political stability are not as strong as projected. Asked whether an American president should call China out the way Ronald Reagan called out the Soviet Union, Dikötter says yes.

But reciprocity has limits. Robinson raises Chinese students in the United States: more than 400,000 Chinese nationals studying at American universities, compared with what he assumes is a much smaller number of Americans studying in China. Dikötter says the United States cannot simply expel them all and should not become like the enemy. It should not lock itself in, or treat everyone from the PRC as a potential spy. Some of the greatest help to the United States, he says, can come precisely from people from the People’s Republic of China. The smartest students he has taught, those who can see the system from the inside out, have come from the PRC.

His position is therefore not fear, but judgment case by case. Do not imitate the Communist Party’s suspicion of all outsiders. Do not become afraid of people because they come from China. But do not accept the party’s myths, either — about its past, its popularity, its reformist intentions, or the stability it projects today.