Ever since Frank Dikötter's first book . . . this prolific star of China studies has challenged conventional truths and broached taboo subjects . . . Dikötter succeeds at bringing different strands together in a highly readable narrative that challenges the foundational myths of the CCP . . . A valuable reminder that today's China – the prosperous, technologically advanced superpower – is a country built on a foundation of violence . . . A tireless chronicler of the numerous crimes and follies of Chinese Communism, Dikötter once again shows his readers who was pulling the trigger of that gun

Sergey Radchenko, Financial Times

Frank Dikötter has rewritten the early history of the Chinese Communist Party from the ground up. Drawing on archival materials long thought inaccessible, he strips away decades of myth to reveal a story of improvisation, violence and opportunism. Written with precision and verve, Red Dawn Over China is the most important reappraisal of modern China to appear in years

PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed

Animating . . . Mao's victory, he argues, owed little to popular enthusiasm and even less to the intrinsic appeal of communist ideas … His pages teem with arrests, purges, sieges, starvation and fear

Pratinav Anil, The Times

Dikötter makes his case clearly and unequivocally . . . Dikötter backs his case up with a deep body of primary sources including archival materials available only in restricted circulation, showcasing the assiduous research typical of this Dutch writer's work, which encompasses 13 books on the history of China . . . Does a service to historians and general readers in showing the receipts . . . Explains why rose-tinted or romantic views of the communist revolution urgently need revision . . . The violence at the centre of the party's project cannot be denied by historians, even if it is rarely mentioned in the party's narrative of its own rise . . . The moral anger at Red Dawn Over China's heart brooks no argument

Rana Mitter, New Statesman

Red Dawn over China tells a powerful story that draws heavily on the CCP's archives . . . Frank Dikötter's account will certainly be challenged, but his evidence is hard to deny

Isabel Hilton, TLS

An iconoclastic history of communism in China that makes for unpleasant but ultimately important reading . . . This new book provides excellent coursework. Its author . . . is one of the most accomplished historians of modern China. Red Dawn Over China draws on a multitude of archival and other sources in Chinese, Russian, French, German and English to provide the most comprehensive and critical (in the best historian's sense of the word) one-volume account of the communists' rise to power yet published . . . His aim is to wrest back control over this crucial period in China's history and subject it to evidence-based scrutiny – in simple terms, to tell the truth . . . Dikötter exposes the shibboleths that characterise the official history of Chinese communism for what they are . . . Dikötter has produced a work of historical iconoclasm that will be challenged in some quarters and banned in others . . . A first-class piece of scholarship that sheds light not only on the many dark chapters in the communist conquest of China but also on the complicated wider environment that made it possible

Graham Hutchings, BBC History Magazine