'' RED DAWN OVER CHINA " : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

RED DAWN OVER CHINA : How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity. By Frank Dikotter.

If asked about Mao Zedong's legacy, Chinese Communist Party cadres recite a precise verdict on him :  70 percent good, 30 percent bad.

Frank Dikotter would recoil at such arithmetical whitewashing. He's renowned for writing an important trilogy of books about Mao's reign over China, digging 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, Dikotter functions as something like a one-man truth commission, relentlessly excavating horrors that took tens of millions of lives.

In '' Red Dawn Over China '' Dikotter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong and Stanford's Hoover Institution, delivers a powerful engrossing and opinionated prequel to the trilogy, showing how the Communists battled their way to power in the decades after World War 1.

Much of the book's impact comes from the depth of research that Dikotter 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.

The World Students Society thanks Gary J Bass.