RED DAWN OVER CHINA: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, by Frank Dikötter

《红色黎明照耀中国——共产主义如何征服四分之一的人类》(Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity)，冯客(Frank Dikötter)著

If asked about Mao Zedong’s legacy, Chinese Communist Party cadres recite a precise verdict on him: 70 percent good, 30 percent bad. Frank Dikötter would recoil at such arithmetical whitewashing. He’s renowned for writing an important trilogy of books about Mao’s reign over China, digging in far-flung archives to document the oppression and mass atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Although Chinese authorities continue to deny or downplay the grim realities of their past, Dikötter functions as something like a one-man truth commission, relentlessly excavating horrors that took tens of millions of lives.

如果被问及毛泽东的遗产，中国共产党的干部们会背诵出一份精准的裁决：七分功，三分过。冯客显然会对这种“算术式的粉饰”不以为然。他因撰写了关于毛泽东统治时期的重要三部曲而闻名，通过广泛发掘档案，记录了“大跃进”和“文革”时期的压迫与大规模暴行。尽管中国官方持续否认或淡化这段历史的残酷现实，但冯客就像是一个单枪匹马的真相委员会，坚持不懈地揭露那些夺走了数千万生命的恐怖事实。

In “Red Dawn Over China,” Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, delivers a powerful, engrossing and opinionated prequel to his trilogy, showing how the Communists battled their way to power in the decades after World War I.

在《红色黎明照耀中国》中，这位任职于香港大学和斯坦福大学胡佛研究所的历史学家为他的三部曲加上了一部有力、动人但充满个人观点的“前传”，揭示了共产党在第一次世界大战后的几十年里是如何一路厮杀夺取政权的。

Much of the book’s impact comes from the depth of research that Dikötter did, enterprisingly drawing on more than 300 volumes of internal party papers produced around the country, which found their way to Hong Kong. His ambition is to give a voice to the untold millions of Chinese who were silenced by utopian Communist violence and repression.

这本书的影响力很大程度上源于冯客极具深度的研究。他怀着极大的热忱研究了流转至香港的300多卷党内文件，它们来自全国各地。他的雄心在于为数以百万计被共产主义乌托邦式的暴力与镇压所噤声的中国人发声。

Dikötter argues that from the party’s founding in 1921 until the end of World War II in 1945, Mao’s revolutionaries were utterly marginal. Even by the overblown figures of the Communist International, China before 1940 had perhaps one Communist per 1,700 people — a number roughly similar to the United States at the time.

冯客指出，从1921年建党到1945年二战结束，毛泽东领导的革命力量始终处于边缘地位。即便根据共产国际夸大的数据，1940年以前的中国，大约每1700人中才有一名共产党员——这一比例与当时的美国大致相当。

So how did this tiny band take over a country as enormous as China? Dikötter’s answer is blunt: “The key word is violence, and a willingness to inflict it.” Far from an overwhelming mass movement that inevitably swept to power, Dikötter retells the Chinese Revolution as an unlikely event, propelled less by popular support than by unyielding cruelty and not a little bit of luck.

那么，这支小小的队伍是如何接管了中国这样庞大的国家的？冯客的回答直截了当：“关键词是暴力，以及施加暴力的意愿。”冯客重新讲述的中国革命并非一场势不可挡的浩大群众运动，而是一场充满偶然性的事件，其动力与其说来自民众支持，不如说来自毫不妥协的残酷手段，以及相当程度的运气。

Mao also had outside help, a common feature of civil wars. Although the Chinese revolutionaries styled themselves as representing the authentic will of the people, Dikötter argues that on several occasions their movement was shaped and saved by foreigners — in particular, the Soviet Union. China’s Communist activists took inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution and got training, indoctrination and weapons from Soviet agents in China. In 1926, a Comintern agent from the Soviet Union appointed a 32-year-old Mao to run an institute training activists to organize the peasants.

像许多内战一样，毛泽东也得到了外部援助。尽管中国革命者标榜自己代表了人民的真实意志，但冯客认为，他们的运动曾多次被外国力量（尤其是苏联）塑造并拯救。中国的共产主义活动家从布尔什维克革命中汲取灵感，并从苏联驻华特工那里获得培训、思想灌输和武器。1926年，一名苏联共产国际特工任命了时年32岁的毛泽东去管理一所培训农民运动骨干的讲习所。

Despite Joseph Stalin’s assistance, the Chinese Communists were nearly obliterated in the mid-30s by the armies of the Nationalist government led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The Communists had not won over the urban workers, and despite the appeal of land redistribution, rural villagers feared the terror and exploitation of Communist troops.

尽管有斯大林的援助，中国共产党在30年代中期仍险些被蒋介石领导的国民政府军队剿灭。共产党当时并未赢得城市工人，而且尽管土地改革具有吸引力，但农民更畏惧红军的恐怖手段和征敛。

Farmers were also more worried about droughts, floods and frost than an exploitative merchant class. By the time the Communists finished their desperate retreat from the Nationalists in the Long March in 1935, Dikötter acerbically writes, their ranks were so depleted that they “had roughly the same popular appeal as an obscure religious sect or minor secret society.”

相比于“商人阶级的剥削”，农民们更担心旱涝灾害。冯客尖刻地写道，到1935年共产党结束了从国民党追击下仓皇撤退的长征时，其队伍已严重削弱，以至于他们“在民众中的吸引力大概只相当于一个籍籍无名的宗教教派或小型秘密结社”。

This time the Communists were saved by, of all things, Japanese aggression. After Japanese forces stormed into China’s northeastern vastness of Manchuria in 1931, the Communists remained preoccupied with fighting the Nationalists, not the foreign invaders. In 1937, Imperial Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China — a catastrophe that would claim the lives of some 14 million Chinese people. Mao, despite entering a fractious and temporary United Front with the Nationalists, preferred to let Nationalist troops bear the brunt of Japan’s onslaught as the Communist armies regrouped and established control of new territories.

这一次，拯救共产党的竟然是日本的侵略。1931年日军侵入中国东北大片领土后，共产党仍专注于对抗国民党而非外敌。1937年，日本帝国发动全面侵华战争——这场灾难夺去了约1400万中国人的生命。毛泽东虽然与国民党建立了貌合神离的临时“统一战线”，但他更倾向于让国民党军队承担抗日冲击的重担，共产党军队则乘机休整并建立新根据地的控制权。

While other histories, such as the Harvard political scientist Tony Saich’s authoritative “From Rebel to Ruler,” have discussed the difficulty that the Communists had in reaching the working class and the peasants, Dikötter spends little time on the party’s socioeconomic or cultural blandishments, instead concentrating on its violence and indoctrination.

虽然其他史学著作——如哈佛政治学家托尼·赛奇的权威著作《从叛乱者到统治者》（From Rebel to Ruler）——也讨论过共产党在争取工农阶级时面临的困难，但冯客很少花时间描写该党在社会经济或文化上的诱导手段，而是集中关注其暴力手段和思想灌输。

In the areas they conquered, Dikötter writes, Communists imposed “a state of terror,” executing local officials and those considered “politically unreliable.” He chillingly shows the Communists trying “to destroy the old order overnight” with an onslaught against Confucianism, religious institutions and village life that foreshadowed the Cultural Revolution decades later: “People were set against each other in so-called ‘struggle meetings,’ denouncing all authority, whether village elders, clan leaders or simply parents and siblings.”

冯客写道，在共产党的根据地，他们实施“恐怖统治”，处决地方官员和被认为“政治上不可靠”的人。他用冷峻的笔调展示了共产党如何试图通过抨击儒家思想、宗教机构和乡村生活，从而“在一夜之间摧毁旧秩序”，这预示了几十年后的文革：“人们在所谓的‘斗争大会’上反目成仇，谴责一切权威，无论是村长、族长，还是普通的父母兄弟。”

The Communists got another invaluable boost from the Soviet Union when it finally entered the war against Imperial Japan, days after the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima. A million Soviet soldiers charged into Japanese-occupied Manchuria, a crucial strategic and economic prize. While Mao negotiated in bad faith about a coalition government with the Nationalists, the Soviets secretly connived with the Chinese Communists to facilitate their takeover of Manchuria after the Soviets departed. The Soviets provided the Communists with tanks, planes and weapons taken from the defeated Japanese Army.

在广岛原子弹轰炸几天后，苏联终于对日宣战，共产党再一次获得了无比宝贵的助力。百万苏联红军冲入具有重要战略和经济价值的日占满洲。当毛泽东在组建联合政府的谈判中同国民党虚与委蛇时，苏联秘密与中共勾结，为苏军撤离后中共接管满洲铺路。苏联还将从战败日军手中缴获的坦克、飞机和武器移交给了中共军队。

Dikötter is withering on credulous Americans who misjudged the Communists, including Vice President Henry A. Wallace and the foreign correspondent Edgar Snow, whose popular 1937 book, “Red Star Over China,” serves as the foil for this book’s title. He also lambastes Gen. George C. Marshall’s doomed mission to pressure Chiang and Mao into a unified government in the first years after the war, treating him not as a peacemaker handed an impossible brief, but a sucker.

冯客对那些误判形势、轻信共产党的美国人给予了严厉抨击，其中包括副总统亨利·华莱士和记者埃德加·斯诺。本书书名讽刺的正是斯诺1937年的畅销书《红星照耀中国》（Red Star Over China）。他还抨击了乔治·马歇尔将军在战后初期迫使蒋毛组建联合政府的徒劳行动，认为马歇尔不是一个接手了不可能任务的和平调解人，而是一个被骗得团团转的人。

Yet, as the journalist Daniel Kurtz-Phelan shows in “The China Mission,” while Marshall unquestionably failed, he was wary of Communist trickery and propaganda, warning President Harry Truman in 1946 that China would always be vulnerable to Soviet subversion “so long as there remains a separate Communist government and a separate Communist army in China.”

然而，正如记者丹尼尔·库尔茨-费伦在《中国任务》（The China Mission）中所展示的，马歇尔虽然毫无疑问地失败了，但他对共产党的策略和宣传一直保持警惕。他在1946年警告哈里·杜鲁门总统，只要中国“存在一个独立的共产党政府和独立的共产党军队”，就永远容易受到苏联的颠覆。

Ending his book with the conquest of Tibet in the early ’50s, Dikötter ominously writes: “Only Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan still eluded the reach of the Chinese Communist Party.” Today the party faces serious headwinds at home, from high youth unemployment to Xi Jinping’s escalating purge of the military. Yet since 2017, Xi has taken to declaring that the world is experiencing “great changes unseen in a century,” with party elites taking Brexit and Donald Trump’s first election as evidence of a precipitous Western decline that facilitates their own ascendancy.

冯客在书中以50年代初共产党征服西藏作为结尾，他以阴沉的笔调写下：“在那个时候，只有香港、澳门和台湾尚未落入中共的掌控。”如今，中共在国内面临严重逆风，从高企的青年失业率到习近平对军队不断升级的清洗。然而自2017年以来，习近平开始宣称世界正经历“百年未有之大变局”，党内精英将英国脱欧和特朗普首次当选视为西方急剧衰落的证据，认为这为自身的崛起铺平了道路。

Trump keeps confirming their viewpoint, by launching and losing a trade war against China, maiming NATO and alienating Japanese and South Korean allies. Reading Dikötter’s book today, it’s hard not to hear echoes: Once again a foolish foreigner rides to the Chinese Communist Party’s rescue.

特朗普不断印证着他们的观点：他发动并输掉了对华贸易战，削弱了北约，并疏远了日韩盟友。在今天阅读冯客的书，很难不听到历史的回声：又一个愚蠢的外国人正忙着来当中国共产党的救星。

RED DAWN OVER CHINA: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity | By Frank Dikötter | Bloomsbury | 362 pp. | $33

《红色黎明照耀中国：共产主义如何征服四分之一的人类》 | 冯客 著 | Bloomsbury出版 | 362页 | 33美元