Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today's China and what the Chinese Communist Party's choices mean for the rest of the world

Isabel Hilton, New Statesman Books of the Year

A clear-eyed and detailed account ... Dikötter has been mining Chinese primary sources for decades

Observer

A pulsating account that makes clear how important it is to look beneath the surface when it comes to any period or region in history – but above all to China

Peter Frankopan, TLS

Presents a very different take on the Chinese economic miracle than the conventional wisdom ... Convincingly shows how foreign capital pouring into China ... became a key ingredient of economic growth at a time of intensifying repression following the Tiananmen Square massacre. It also shatters the myth of competent technocratic policymaking under leaders such as Deng Xiaoping ... Most radically, the book makes the case that, rather than being a sharp break with the recent past, President Xi Jinping's more nakedly authoritarian rule is in many ways a continuation of trends that started long ago

Daron Acemoglu, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

Dikötter's highly-readable primer provides a valuable corrective ... Helps puncture the image of China's inexorable economic rise

New Statesman

A revolutionary book . . . Breaking with the bland orthodoxy peddled in some of our finest universities, Dikötter says that China today is a Leviathan where a party, fascist in all but name, controls society … Dikötter marshals a daunting array of statistics and documents . . . Historians such as Dikötter are there to warn

Michael Sheridan, Sunday Times