Frank Dikötter

In Patient Zero (2003) and Narcotic Culture (2004), Dikötter posits that the impact of the prohibition of opium on the Chinese people led to greater harm than the effects of the drug itself. These works have been poorly received by academics, with Chinese historian Kathleen L. Lodwick saying that "Narcotic Culture appears to be one of the revisionist histories of which there have been several lately that have aimed at convincing us that imperialism wasn't all that bad, or at least that we should not blame the imperialists, in this case the opium traders who made vast fortunes from the trade, for the social problems they created. Closer attention to accuracy in the bibliography would have caught some errors, which appear more than once and so are not simply typos."[2]

The People's Trilogy

Dikötter is the author of The People's Trilogy,[3] three books that document the impact of Communist-led China on the lives of ordinary people on the basis of new archival material.[4] The first volume, titled Mao's Great Famine, won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize (now called the Baillie Gifford Prize) for nonfiction,[5] Britain's most prestigious book award for non-fiction, in 2010.[6] The second installment, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2014,[7] losing out to This Boy by Alan Johnson.[8] The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976, concludes the trilogy and was shortlisted for the PEN International Hessell-Tiltman Prize in 2017.[9]

Felix Wemheuer, lecturer in Chinese history and politics at the University of Vienna, in his review of Mao's Great Famine, criticized Dikötter for his book's lack of explanation of local variations in destruction and death toll, his ignorance of Mao's efforts to deal with the problems, and his lack of sophisticated arguments due to his political agenda: to reduce Chinese Communism to terror.[10] In his review of The Tragedy of Liberation, Wemheuer wrote, "Dikötter is retelling an old story about the early years of the Cold War based on new sources. While many journalists celebrate A Tragedy of Liberation in their reviews, most Western historians, political scientists and sociologists offer a much more complicated version of early PRC history that includes diverse experiences and local variations. Finding credible alternative narratives is a huge task that warrants future research by modern China scholars. Unfortunately, Dikötter's condemning of the Chinese revolution in his People's Trilogy requires an academic response that consists of more than a few novel local case studies."[11] In 2010, Pankaj Mishra described Dikötter's work as "boldly and engagingly revisionist",[12] leading to a public dispute between the two.[13] Adam Cathcart, lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Leeds, has pointed out Dikötter's problematic use of sources.[14][15] Mao's biographer Philip Short wrote that "Dikötter's errors are strangely consistent. They all serve to strengthen his case against Mao and his fellow leaders." In reference to Dikötter's errors and misleading comments, Short said the main problem with Dikötter's book is that it does not offer a credible explanation of why Mao and his colleagues acted as they did. Short posited that Dikötter's book "set out to make the case for the prosecution, rather than providing balanced accounts of the periods they describe."[16]

• 2011: Samuel Johnson Prize for Mao's Great Famine
• 2017: honorary doctorate from Leiden University

• 1992: The Discourse of Race in Modern China – digital edition
• 1995: Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period
• 1997: The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan
• 1998: Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China
• 2002: Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China
• 2003: Patient Zero: China and the Myth of the Opium Plague – digital edition
• 2004: Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China
• 2007: Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China
• 2008: The Age of Openness: China Before Mao
• 2010: Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962
• 2013: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957
• 2016: The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976
• 2019: How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century
• 2022: China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower –

• Cultural Revolution
• Great Leap Forward
• History of the People's Republic of China (1949–1976)
• Mao Zedong

• Official website
• Interview about Dikötter's book Mao's Great Famine (audio)