Frank Dikötter: Red Dawn Over China

Over a century ago, the Chinese Communist Party emerged as a band of radical, Soviet Union-backed countryside insurgents. Now, it presides over one of the world’s major economic, technological, and military powers, with a population of 1.4 billion. Isabel Hilton talks to leading China historian and Samuel Johnson Prize-winner Frank Dikötter about his gripping new history, Red Dawn Over China, unpacking China’s path to Communism and how it shaped the world we know today.