In a precursor to the Great Leap Forward, hundreds died daily, trapped in areas between the communists and the nationalists, “reduced to eating grass and leaves, doomed to slow starvation”.

Frank Dikötter has been described as “the historian of China”, and one can see why. His previous books offer powerful and incisive analysis of the Mao years and the post-Mao era. This book describes the battle for China’s future between the nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek and the communists led by Mao Zedong, from 1921 until the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It details in compelling narrative the alliances formed and then broken, the Japanese invasion, the civil war and – most significantly – the Soviet Union’s influence in China throughout this period.

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