When Mainstream Success Trumps Scholarly Integrity: The Frustrating Case of Frank Dikötter

Depressingly, although not surprisingly, this China historian continues to rake in book sales, despite the consistently poor academic response to his work

This is a bit of an unconventional topic for this blog, and if it’s not your cup of tea, I’ll certainly understand. If you have no interest in reading a niche academic meta-review takedown of a China historian, please just carry on with your day as usual. I’ll get back to the travel content soon enough.

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Introduction:

If you are unfamiliar with Frank Dikötter, he’s a well-known and high-selling Dutch historian based in Hong Kong with a broadly revisionist approach to modern Chinese history. His books over the last two decades have variously covered Chinese history in the late Qing, the Nationalist era, the early days of the Communist takeover, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, among others. His works are popular, have won awards, and have been well-received by general audiences. At the same time, his works have elicited feedback from his academic peers that charitably could be described as lukewarm. By peers, I explicitly refer to historians with the same topical focus, and by lukewarm I mean he just gets….lambasted.

His works have elicited academic feedback from his peers that charitably could be described as lukewarm.

For those unfamiliar with the style of his writing, Dikötter has built his career on taking contrarian positions on modern Chinese history, supplying salacious material to general audiences hungry for provocative China content. He might as well have been describing his career when he made this comment regarding his interest in archival research in an interview last year:

“My career has been nothing but driven by opportunism: I see an opportunity and I will seize it.”

A conclusion-driven approach is evident in his writing - the introductory chapters will establish he is setting out to “demolish” or “overturn” some established idea about Chinese history, and the following chapters are filled with the evidence he has gathered to prosecute that conviction. No matter how thin, anecdotal, or flimsy the evidence is, if it helps point towards his desired conclusion, he’ll use it, while blithely ignoring or glossing over contradictory details. He specializes in using shocking or disturbing anecdotes pulled from Chinese archival research to manipulate an emotional response in the reader, usually as a substitute for cohesive analysis. His writing conveys the impression that his intended thesis drove his search for evidence (and not that his thesis was reached after reviewing the available evidence). Perhaps we could call this “seeking truth from scraps”?

He specializes in using shocking or disturbing anecdotes gleaned from Chinese archival research to manipulate an emotional response in the reader

Now while this engaging writing style garners high ratings on Amazon and adulations from mainstream media, a quick browse through academic databases immediately reveals how poorly his work stands up to the critique of his peers. While I won’t go so far as to say it’s unanimously negative, it’s still…very bad. Even at points where he receives praise for presenting interesting ideas or making good points, the reviewer inevitably gets to the “but…”. What comes after the “but” is usually some combination of “the work is sloppy, the style is non-academic, the analysis lacks rigor, the conclusions are unconvincing, and the bias is evident”.

Unfortunately, this damning feedback is mostly invisible to casual consumers of this kind of writing. After all, reader reviews on Amazon or The Guardian are easy to find and free to read, while scholarly reviews are usually hidden behind paywalls in academic journals. Plus, to reach critical conclusions like an academic, you have to already be VERY familiar with the topic. This creates an obvious consumer information asymmetry between the popular and expert opinions of his work, one that the casual reader can hardly be blamed for.

Reader reviews on Amazon or in The Guardian are easy to find and free to read, while scholarly reviews are usually hidden behind paywalls in academic journals.

However, I believe it’s crucial that the open-minded and curious reader be fully informed as to the quality of the media and scholarship they consume. Quality can be subjective, but when it comes to a niche subject for which I’m not a specialist, the evaluation of one’s expert peers is certainly my preferred way to assess quality - an approach I recommend to everyone, and one I’d like to demonstrate here. In order to do that, I spent a weekend going through the academic reviews of his books and extracted the most relevant quotes, presented below. They’re usually not downright rude or aggressive; this is academia after all. But they often do contain some entertaining little scholarly zingers.

So get yourself a bowl of popcorn, fix yourself a drink, and join me in reviewing what Frank Dikötter’s peers have to say about his body of work:

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Book 1: Narcotic Culture, 2004, Dikötter, Laamann, Zhou

This book about opium consumption in the Qing Dynasty is not his first book, but I think this is the first one that really got broader attention. While reviewers in anthropology, health and other tangential sectors gave this one decent marks, reviewers with an academic focus on the Chinese history of narcotics were unified in their criticism, admitting interesting ideas, but emphasizing weak arguments, an off-putting tone, and an odd insistence on playing down the health issues associated with opium consumption.

Narcotic Culture Reviewer 1:

Timothy Brook, Republic of China Chair, Department of History, University of British Columbia. Review:¹

“Narcotic Culture stands out as the most aggressive bid to re-interpret the history of opium. The book is animated by one overwhelming idea: that opium was not “bad.”

“Densely written and voluminously documented, it demolishes many shibboleths that should not have stood the test of time.”

“On the other hand, the authors also float some extraordinary propositions that go not only beyond received wisdom, but beyond actual evidence and even common sense.”

“There is a totality about these claims, an urgency to the insistence that everything previously black is now white, and that everything we have presumed to be white is black after all, which suggests that some agenda other than a purely historical reconsideration of China’s experience with opium is at work.”

Narcotic Culture Reviewer 2:

Kathleen Lodwick, Historian, Professor of History, Penn State University. Review:²

“This book is an interesting but uneven account of narcotics in China.”

“…it is hard to accept the idea that China had no problem with opium addition given the statistics on imports of that drug before and after legalization in 1860.”

“The authors of Narcotic Culture…are clearly, and curiously, opposed to the development of medical science, viewing such developments as attempts to control the self-treatment of disease.”

“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, from the social problems they created”

“Closer attention to accurate in the bibliography would have caught some errors, which appear more than once and so are not simply typos”

Narcotic Culture Reviewer 3:

Alan Baumler, Asian Studies Director, History Department, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Review:³

“Unfortunately, the authors have not been terribly successful in overcoming the fragmentary nature of their data.”

“The volume is full of sweeping claims based on very slim evidence.”

“The authors could have benefited from engaging with the existing secondary literature.“

”Unfortunately, the authors’ unwillingness to engage with the secondary literature, poor conceptualization, and questionable use of evidence make the study less useful than it could be.”

Narcotic Culture Reviewer 4:

John Y. Wong, Professor (now retired) University of Sydney. Review:⁴

“Narcotic Culture attempts to demolish a case established by a whole generation of China scholars…the case encapsulated by the late John Fairbank…when he stated the opium trade was the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times.”

“The book tackles none of these issues and accordingly does not success in demolishing the argument of Fairbank and others. Rather, by setting out the untold misery caused by the programs of detoxifying opium addicts in the first half of the twentieth century, the book has reinforced the case it seeks to demolish”.

Narcotic Culture Reviewer 5:

Kristin Stapleton, Chair of the Department of History, University of Buffalo (at the time of the review, University of Kentucky). Review:⁵

“The evidence for their core argument that prohibition was responsible for more harm to the Chinese than widespread opium consumption is not conclusive.”

“Their argument is further undermined by uncritical inclusion of fanciful accounts of opium’s benefits. In a few places, the authors overstate the case to the level of absurdity.”

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Book 2: The Age of Openness: China Before Mao, 2008, Frank Dikötter

This was Dikötter’s next book after Narcotic Culture. The core thesis is that republican-era China has been unfairly maligned in the modern record, challenging the idea that “warlords”, “imperialism” or “disintegration” were the defining themes of the time, and that the era instead, “might very well be qualified as a golden age of engagement with the world” (p.3). The core idea Dikötter sets out to demonstrate is that the nationalist period was “open”, a natural course of China’s development interrupted by the aberration of the Mao era. In support of this thesis, the book is thematically organized into chapters around this topic, namely: “open governance”, “open borders”, “open minds” and “open markets”.

Dikötter hopes the reader will appreciate how Nationalist China was receptive to foreign ideas and cultures, enjoyed photography and foreign music, was a fertile field of liberal thought, a haven for religious expression and the arts, enjoyed effective diplomacy, and had admirable progressive ambitions for reform of education, healthcare, democratic governance, and the modernization of the economy, among other things.

This book was the most lightly reviewed among Dikötter’s older works. On JSTOR, I could only find two short reviews, and only one from a historian with an academic focus on the republican era. Dr. Andrea Janku of SOAS thought his ideas were interesting, and gave some credit, but saw flaws too, and thus hedged her praise:⁶

“It is certainly time to put an end to the one-sided view of “China before Mao” as a period of abject poverty, violence and disorder, political fragmentation, and never-endling warfare. Recent research, including Dikotter’s own, has done much to enhance our knowledge of this period. However, we should not be tempted to just reverse the image and see a “golden age of engagement with the world”.

“While I therefore happily agree with this book’s overall message, I find a fair degree of idealization.”

“Having highlighted the achievements of the new republican cosmopolitanism, the crucial question is how it related to rural poverty, especially in crisis situations.”

“One wonders why no mention is made of the famine of 1928-31, which is described as the most deadly in the republican period, with an estimated death toll of 10 million.”

“Whether or not ‘the image of a war-torn, enfeebled if not starving China…is very much the exception rather than the norm’ (p. 6) is still open to debate…recent work…suggests otherwise”

If I might be so bold as to add my own commentary: I can imagine this depiction of republican China is compelling to someone who doesn’t know much about the era. Anecdotes of how cultural elites enjoyed jazz in Shanghai and ‘talkie’ movies in Guangzhou while foreign businessmen thronged the streets of Beijing make for interesting Nationalist-era trivia. Dikötter has set himself to the narrowly-defined task of demonstrating that the republican era was “open”, and he succeeds, but once this case is made, it’s unclear what the educated reader is to do with this information.

In his focused effort to counter the prevailing one-sided vision of the Republican period, he fashions his own one-sided vision of reality that distorts even more severely, as he fails to engage at all with the facts of the poor quality of life for the average Chinese citizen during this era. Being "open" does not mean it was successful. This book comes off as an attempt to leverage charming anecdotes on the progressive and international lifestyles of the cosmopolitan elite to sugarcoat poor domestic governance that (while often well-meaning, and sometimes even partially useful in achieving its lofty goals) was ultimately chaotic, brutal, corrupt, and ineffective.⁷

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Book 3: Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 2010, Frank Dikötter

Dikötter’s next book was an accounting of the Great Leap Forward and famine between 1958-1961. He sets out here to prove that the death total is much higher than other studies previously estimated, and to assign greater personal blame on Mao than nearly any mainstream historian has before. To support his assertions, Dikötter presents new research from Chinese provincial archives. This book got quite a lot of academic attention, almost all bad.

Mao’s Great Famine Reviewer 1:

Felix Wemheuer, Professor, Modern Chinese Studies, University of Cologne (at the time, lecturer at University of Vienna).

Wemheuer has written himself on the famine and the Great Leap Forward, including several journal articles, and done extensive fieldwork interviewing villagers in Henan.⁸ He specializes in studying this period and is hardly an academic that could be considered "friendly“ to Maoist-era China. But he felt so negatively about this book that he wrote a 10-page review essay in critique of it.⁹

“If one is familiar with the research and expects a brand new interpretation of the famine, one will be disappointed. Dikötter's account reads like a long list of atrocities committed by Mao's regime against the Chinese people and bears the hallmarks of having been written in furious outrage. The polemic and emotional language of the book is clearly targeted at the general reader.”

“…he claims to have read the sources "against the grain" and treated them carefully…However, Dikötter clearly does not always adhere to this promise of analytical rigor. In many chapters, he makes an argument and provides five or six examples from archival documents that deal mostly with events on the county or village level.”

“Western scholars have shown great local variations in destruction and death toll, but Dikötter does not even raise the question of how we can explain these huge local variations. It seems that analytic explanation is not his primary goal.” [oof]

“Dikötter does not present enough evidence to deconstruct the adjustment policies as a “myth”. One reason might be that his focus is on horrifying stories, and not on policy changes at the center.”

“It is a pity that Dikötter did not use his very valuable new sources to present more sophisticated arguments.”

“The best the book can do is inspire scholars and students to continue their research and to learn more about the greatest famine in Chinese history.”

Mao’s Great Famine Reviewer 2:

Cormac Ó Gráda, Professor Emeritus University College Dublin (reviewed while the author was a scholar at Princeton).

I find Ó Gráda’s commentary relevant, though he is not a *China* historian, because he is specifically an expert on famines. He took great objection to Dikötter’s analysis of the famine conditions in the Great Leap Forward writing a 12-page rebuttal essay of Mao’s Great Famine as a review.¹⁰

“The tone throughout is one of abhorrence and outrage, and sometimes MGF reads more like a catalogue of anecdotes about atrocities than a sustained analytic argument.”

“MGF may become the best-known account of the GLF famine for a while. But should it? It is not a comprehensive account of the famine; it is dismissive of academic work on the topic; it is weak on context and unreliable with data; and it fails to note that many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history over the previous century or so. More attention to economic history and geography and to the comparative history of famines would have made for a much more useful book.”

“MGF is full of numbers but there are few tables and no graphs. Quantification is not its strong point”.

“MGF’s reliance on fresh archival sources and interviews and its extensive bibliography of Chinese-language items are impressive, but its bite-size chapters, (thirty-seven in all) and breathless prose style – replete with expressions like “plummeted,” “rocketed,” “beaten to a pump,” “beaten black and blue,” “frenzy,” “ceaseless,” “frenzied witch-hunt” – are more reminiscent of the tabloid press...”

“The success of MGF should not deter other historians from writing calmer and more nuanced books that worry more about getting the numbers right and pay due attention to geography and history”. [yikes]

Mao’s Great Famine Reviewer 3:

Anthony Garnaut, China historian, University of Oxford.

This review is especially notable, because Garnaut appears to have read both Tombstone by Yang Jisheng and Mao’s Great Famine by Dikötter and then published his review of the two books together in context. In his doubleheader review, he praises Yang and criticizes Dikötter heavily, both for sloppy academic work AND for a suspicious pattern of footnotes in archival materials that reveals how Dikötter had obviously referred heavily to Yang’s work without citing or acknowledging him at all (except to criticize him). This review is blunt:¹¹

“Dikotter provides his readers with a stream of vivid descriptions of suffering citizens neglected by their leaders, interspersed with numerical lists of terrible things, which are likely to generate discomfort on the part of the reader but not comprehension.”

“The juxtaposition and sampling techniques used by Dikötter fall short of academic best practice.”

“In these chapters, Dikötter’s contribution to scholarship is to strip Yang’s archival discoveries and synthesis of published material of the historical context provided by Yang, and to rearrange the resulting fragments into an idiosyncratic vignette of totalitarian folly.” [he actually seems angry here]

“The allegations Dikötter levels at Yang here are bewildering. They are either sloppily drawn or disingenuous.”

“To this reviewer, Dikötter’s criticism of Tombstone as a poorly organized and poorly researched piece of work reads like a tenuous justification for appropriating its content as his own, and reorganizing its material to conform with his own preferred meta-narrative.”

“Dikötter’s maverick interpretation of the Shanghai Conference not only blithely ignores the substantial commentary on the conference by other scholars and several of its key participants, including Bo Yibo, but defies the very plain wording of the archival document in his possession on which he hangs his case.”

Mao’s Great Famine Reviewer 4:

Lucien Bianco, Historian, Professor (retired), School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris

I have included Bianco here, though he stands out as an academic outlier who is friendly to Dikötter’s work, as an example of someone very negative about the Mao era/generally anti-communist and would have no reason to “go easy” on Dikötter. Even HE has concerns about Dikötter’s disregard for demographic context, which he expresses both directly in his review¹², as well as by taking swipes at Dikötter when reviewing other books that deal with the same topic.

“There is something lacking in this fine book: a demographic and economic perspective of the catastrophe. The latter is too lightly attempted, the former not at all.”

“Would it not have been more useful to set our briefly that demographic transition had hardly progressed on the eve of the Great Leap Forward? Fertility remained high, and mortality was decreasing at a rate all the more vigorous as generalised prevention (essentially vaccination) and other measures adopted in the previous eight years had reversed, or in certain cases eradicated, most infectious and parasitic disease. In less than a decade, infant mortality had fallen by two-thirds – according to official figures, which were no doubt given to exaggerating achievements. At any rate, infants’ survival was better assured in China on the eve of the famine than ever before. Many children who starved to death between 1958 and 1962 would have not been alive in 1958 had infant mortality stayed at the pre-1949 level.”

And, in his 2013 review of Wemheuer et al.’s “Eating Bitterness”, he favorably contrasts the work of those authors to that of Dikötter:¹³

“’Espousing greater prudence than Dikötter, they stand by previous estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from the famine.”

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Book 4: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957, 2013, Frank Dikötter

His next book set out to attack the idea that the first few years of early-PRC history contained any good policies or improvements to quality of life for China’s population. This book was more lightly reviewed, perhaps because it focuses on a less-popular period. As usual though, the academic reviews were harsh, focusing especially on Dikötter’s sloppiness with data and agenda-driven writing.

The Tragedy of Liberation Reviewer 1:

Felix Wemheuer, Professor, Modern Chinese Studies, University of Cologne (at the time, lecturer at the University of Vienna). Review:¹⁴

“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. If a teacher wishes to have heated debates in a class on Chinese history, he or she should assign Dikötter’s provocative book for reading.”

“As a more balanced and calm academic account of campaigns and terror after “liberation,” I recommend Yang Kuisong’s Zhonghua renmin gongheguo jianguoshi yanjiu (Research on the Foundation of the PRC State) for everyone who is able to read Chinese.”

The Tragedy of Liberation Reviewer 2:

Adam Cathcart, Associate Professor of East Asian History, University of Leeds

A commentary on a chapter of The Tragedy of Liberation entitled “The Hurricane”, published online.¹⁵

“It may be that the author simply does not care what the sources cited actually say and is hoping that his assertion of hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation will transition from bold claim to factual terrain without being unduly challenged.”

The Tragedy of Liberation Reviewer 3:

Sreemati Chakrabati, Vice-Chair, Institute of Chinese Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi.

You will never hate a history book as much as Chakrabati hates this book in her review:¹⁶

“On reading this book, the question that comes to mind is, how can a historian and a supposed work of history be so blatantly one-sided?

“Dikötter has selectively used the massive data as his disposal…”

“This book cannot be recommended to any student of Chinese history or any reader who wishes to learn about the early years of the PRC in an objective manner. The only thing one can learn from this book is that history should not be written this way.”

“This one-sided story of China’s liberation is one that the academic world can do without.”

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Book 5: The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 2017, Frank Dikötter

This book was again only lightly reviewed by the scholarly world, although the mainstream media reviews were abundant. Maybe academics were just sick of Dikötter by now?

The Cultural Revolution Reviewer 1:

Fabio Lanza, Cultural Historian, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona

In his scathing journal review:¹⁷

“There is almost nothing new in the description Dikötter concocts…”

“…the author does not seem to have any interest in the historical or political understanding of mass movements and mass participation.”

“Throughout the volume, Dikötter repeatedly makes controversial statements while providing very little evidence for them…”

“…it goes against a long‐standing effort in the field of PRC history to produce nuanced, well‐sourced, complex, historically rich, and truly innovative analyses. Any reader not familiar with the historiography of Maoist China would be better served by not starting with this book.” [ouch]

The Cultural Revolution Reviewer 2:

Daniel Leese, Historian, Professor at Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Freiburg. In his less-scathing but still-critical online review:¹⁸

“While the author of this review is supportive of approaches aimed at decentering party history and the Cultural Revolution in particular, several issues hamper the explanatory power of this volume, at least for a scholarly audience.”

“The examples mostly serve to illustrate preconceived claims, as there is no engagement with alternative interpretations nor a critical evaluation of the sources relied upon.”

“Causes and effects are seldom placed in clear correlation…the lack of comprehensive analysis…often leads to more questions than answers.”

“This is a well-readable account of the Cultural Revolution for a broad audience that offers new perspectives, which are definitely worthwhile pondering, although probably not all the proposed answers will hold up.”

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Book 6: China After Mao, 2022, Frank Dikötter

This book is newish, and I haven’t been able to find any scholarly reviews of it yet. Maybe they’re coming soon, or perhaps academics have just given up. I haven’t read it, and I won’t. Predictably, the mainstream press reviews are positive so far, though The China Project had a more mixed review. Will you read it?

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Frank Dikötter’s introductions usually include descriptions of him as “controversial” or “contrarian”. This is more generous than he deserves. He isn't "controversial"...he's sloppy, biased, and unprofessional; and that’s just what his overly polite peers think.

We students of history deserve better than the agenda-driven revisionism of a historian crafting an obviously skewed version of history for a country he misunderstands and mischaracterizes so brazenly and intentionally.

Modern Chinese history is deeply and unavoidably political, with some true catastrophes that warrant hard and unflinching examination. Navigating these emotional and often tragic topics requires a deft and sophisticated touch from a mature, dispassionate scholar. Unfortunately, Dikötter is just not that guy.

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These citations were edited on April 3, 2025 to correct source link errors in #3 and #4.

1. Timothy Brook. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Review). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Volume 69, Issue 02, June 2006.

2. Kathleen Lodwick. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (review). China Review International, Volume 12, No 1, Spring 2005

3. Alan Baumler. Review, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China. The Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 64, Issue 01, February 2005.

4. Wong, J. Y. Review [Untitled]. The China Journal, no. 53, 2005, pp. 240–42.

5. Kristin Stapleton. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China Review. The China Journal, Jan. 2005, No 53.

6. Andrea Janku. The Age of Openness: China Before Mao: Review The China Journal, July. 2009, No. 62.

7. Specifically, but not limited to failures in: alleviation of poverty and raising of GDP/capita; improvement of health outcomes; protection of workers via effective labor laws; implementation of education and land reform; and prevention of premature death related to, e.g. famine and war.

8. Felix Wemheuer. Dealing with Responsibility for the Great Leap Famine in the People’s Republic of China. The China Quarterly, March 2012, No. 201.

9. Felix Wemheuer. Reviewed Works: Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe. The China Journal, July 2011, No. 66.

10. Cormac Ó Gráda. Great Leap Into Famine: A Review Essay. Population and Development Review, March 2011, Vol 37, No. 1.

11. Anthony Garnaut. Hard facts and half-truths: The new archival history of China’s Great Famine, China Information, Vol. 20, No. 2.

12. Lucien Bianco. Trans. N. Jayaram. “Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, The History of China’s most devastating catastrophe, 1958-62”, China Perspectives, 2011/2 | 2011, 74-75.

13. Lucien Bianco. Trans. Will Thornely. “From the Great Chinese Famine to the Communist Famines”, China Perspectives, 2013/3 | 2013, 85-90.

14. Felix Wemheuer. The Chinese Revolution and “Liberation”: Whose Tragedy? The China Quarterly, No. 219.

15. Adam Cathcart. Quantifying Civilian Casualties in the Northeast During the Chinese Civil War” on sinohk.com in March 2021.

16. Sreemati Chakrabarti. Book Review: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-57. China Report, Volume 50, Issue 3 (2014).

17. Fabio Lanza. Review of The Cultural Revolution. A People’s History 1962-1976. The Historian, Volume 80, Issue 1

18. Daniel Leese. Review of: Dikötter, Frank: The Cultural Revolution. A People's History 1962–1976. London, 2016.