_______________ A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A revolutionary book' Sunday
Times 'A pulsating account that makes clear how important it is to look beneath the surface
when it comes to any period or region in history - but above all to China' Peter Frankopan TLS
'Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today's China and what the
Chinese Communist Party's choices mean for the rest of the world' New Statesman Books of the
Year _______________ From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine a
timely and compelling account of China in the wake of Chairman Mao In China After Mao
award-winning historian Frank Dikötter explores how the People's Republic of China was
transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. His
account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents from the
secret minutes of top party meetings to confidential bank reports. Unfolding with great
narrative sweep this riveting richly detailed chronicle recasts our understanding of an era
that both the regime and foreign admirers celebrate as an economic miracle. In charting four
decades of so-called 'Reform and Opening Up' and China's emergence as a world power Dikötter
tells a fascinating tale of contradictions and illusions of shadow banking anti-corruption
drives and extreme state wealth standing alongside everyday poverty. He examines China's
approach to the 2008 financial crash the country's increasing hostility towards perceived
Western interference and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship - one
equipped with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in
the world. Ultimately the book concludes the communist party's goal was never to join the
democratic sphere but to resist it - and then defeat it. Praise for Frank Dikötter and the
People's Trilogy: 'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre 'The historian of China' Spectator
'One of the few books that anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century simply must
read' New Statesman 'The seminal English language work on the subject' Sunday Times 'Gripping
and masterful' - Simon Sebag Montefiore
