History as Humanity’s CV: A Conversation with Frank Dikötter

Abstract

This wide-ranging and often thought-provoking conversation takes us beyond Frank Dikötter’s record of publication in the field of modern Chinese history to look more at the personal experience and background that has shaped his work—his fascination with language, his lack of a “mother tongue,” his permanent status as a foreigner, his accidental encounter with the China field, his views on a host of topics, ranging from the issue of agency, evidence-driven history, archival research, historical memory, the nature of the humanities and the responsibility of the historian to the key driving values of our modern world.

Keywords:

• Frank Dikötter
• People’s Trilogy
• agency
• archival research
• narrative history

Notes

1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed. (London: Blackwell, 2000).

2 R.A. Lundquist, Electrical Goods in China, Japan, and Vladivostok (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918): 10–11 quoted in Frank Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press); also published as Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China (London: Hurst, 2007): 135.

3 Li Rui, “Du Feng Ke Mao Zedong de dajihuang,” Zhengming, no. 1 (2012): 79–81.

4 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, reprint (New York: Vintage, 1989).

5 Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past & Present, no. 85 (Nov. 1979): 4.

6 See, for instance, the exchange between Anthony Garnaut and Frank Dikotter: Anthony Garnaut, “Hard Facts and Half-truths: The New Archival History of China’s Great Famine,” China Information, 27, no. 2, (2013): 223–46, and Frank Dikotter, “Response to ‘Hard Facts and Half-truths: the New Archival History of China’s Great Famine’,” China Information, 27, no. 3 (2013): 371–78.

7 Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Famine of China, 1958–1962. trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

8 Roderick MacFarquhar, “Who Was Mao Zedong?” The New York Review of Books, October 25, 2012.

9 Yu Xiguang, Dayuejin ku rizi: Shangshuji (The Great Leap Forward and the Years of Bitterness: A Collection of Memorials) (Hong Kong: Shidai chaoliu chubanshe, 2005): 8; Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996): 271–72.

10 Becker, Hungry ghosts, 271–72.

11 Minutes of Mao's interjections at the Shanghai conference, March 1959, Gansu Provincial Archives, 91-18-494, 48, quoted in Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2010): 88.

12 H-PRC, December 2015, https://networks.h-net.org/node/3544/discussions/99266/looking-great-leap-smoking-gun-document#reply-100586.

13 Richard L. Walker, China Under Communism: The First Five Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955); Richard L. Walker, “China Studies in McCarthy’s Shadow: A Personal Memoir,” The National Interest, no. 53 (Fall 1998): 94–101.

14 Paul Krugman, “Donald Trump’s ‘Big Liar’ Technique,” New York Times, September 9, 2016, accessed September 9, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/opinion/donald-trumps-big-liar-technique.html?_r=0.

15 MacFarquhar, “Who Was Mao Zedong?”.

16 Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, Mao, the Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012): 5, 575.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qin Shao

Qin Shao is Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, The College of New Jersey. She is the author of Cultural Modernity: the Nantong Model, 1890–1930 (2004) and Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity (2013).

Frank Dikötter

Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before moving to Asia in 2006, he was Professor of History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. He has published widely on the history of modern China and is the author, most recently, of a ‘People’s Trilogy’ that uses party archives to illustrate the impact of communism on everyday life under Mao. The first book in the trilogy, entitled Mao’s Great Famine, was awarded the Samuel Johnson BBC Non-Fiction Prize in 2011. The final volume, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976, appeared in 2016. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Leiden University in 2017.