"Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years Th
""Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years.
"In this succinct and vigorous book, Frank Dikotter presents a cornucopia of graphic examples to show that China in the first half of the twentieth century, far from being in a state of decay that cal
"Exotic Commodities" is the first book to chart the consumption and spread of foreign goods in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. Richly illustrated and revealin
This close examination of the Chinese prison system during the first half of the 20th century emphasizes the consequences of the superimposed Western-derived models of repentance and rehabilitation on
After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958-1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate t
The era between empire and communism is routinely portrayed as a catastrophic interlude in China's modern history, but this engagingly written book shows instead that the first half of the twentieth c
In 1995, the People's Republic of China passed a controversial Eugenics Law, stressing prevention of "inferior births." Using this statute as a springboard, the author explores the contexts and histor
Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing' , this is the final volume of 'The People's Trilogy', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine. After the economic disaste
To this day, the perception persists that China was a civilization defeated by imperialist Britain's most desirable trade commodity, opium—a drug that turned the Chinese into cadaverous addicts in the
Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in