The Tragedy of Liberation

Following the success of his previous work on the Great Leap Forward, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011, The Tragedy of Liberation has garnered considerable attention in the popular press. Writing for The Sunday Times, Michael Sheridan called it "groundbreaking ... unsparing in its detail, relentless in its research, unforgiving in its judgements." He added that the new evidence marshaled in Dikötter's work would significantly alter mainstream academic interpretations about the relevant period of China history, commenting: "In particular, volume 14 of the Cambridge History of China, which covers the period of this book, will have to be rewritten."[4]

For The Financial Times, Julia Lovell called it "[a] remarkable work of archival research. Dikötter rarely, if ever, allows the story of central government to dominate by merely reporting a top-down directive. Instead, he tracks the grassroots impact of Communist policies – on farmers, factory workers, industrialists, students, monks – by mining archives and libraries for reports, surveys, speeches and memoirs. In so doing, he uncovers astonishing stories of party-led inhumanity and also popular resistance."[5]

Mark O'Neill of the South China Morning Post declared it to be "essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the nature and history of the communist state."[6] In a book review for Human Rights in China, Roger Garside commented: "This book demolishes one of the last surviving myths about communist rule in China: that there was a 'Golden Era' from the time of 'liberation' in 1949 until the launch of the Great Leap Forward in 1958. For too many people outside China, the idea has prevailed for too long that this was a period when the Communist Party of China (CPC) ruled in a way that non-communists could respect."[7]

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 The 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."[8]

Historian Adam Cathcart has criticized Dikötter's misuse of sources in The Tragedy of Liberation, stating for example, "It may be that [Dikötter] simply does not care what the sources cited actually say and is hoping that his assertion of 'hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation' [of civilians in northeast China] will transition from bold claim to factual terrain without being unduly challenged."[9]

Academic Brian DeMare has criticized Dikötter's The Tragedy of Liberation for implying that landlords were a communist-invented fiction.[10] DeMare writes, "Due to Dikötter's choice of phrasing, many readers believe that he is arguing that there were no landlords in China. His citation, however, refers to my UCLA dissertation, where I discuss how the term land lord (dizhu) was an alien word in the countryside [...] There were, to be sure, many landlords in China."[10]