Frank Dikötter
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La Chine après Mao : l'éveil d'une superpuissance
Frank Dikötter
- Tallandier
- 23 Février 2023
- 9791021051461
« Le but du Parti communiste chinois n'a jamais été de rejoindre la sphère démocratique, mais bien de lui résister, puis de la vaincre. » Depuis la mort de Mao, en 1976, la Chine a connu une ascension économique fulgurante. Contrairement à ce que les observateurs occidentaux ont pu croire, ce « miracle » ne s'est pas accompagné d'une démocratisation politique. De manière implacable, le Parti n'a cessé de s'enrichir et d'enraciner sa dictature, assurant le contrôle de ses populations et mettant au point l'un des systèmes de surveillance de masse les plus sophistiqués au monde. En se fondant sur des centaines de documents d'archives inédits - procès-verbaux secrets des réunions du Parti, archives locales ou rapports bancaires confidentiels -, Frank Dikötter analyse les politiques d'importations de technologies, la répression brutale des élans de liberté marqués par les événements de la place Tian'anmen en 1989, le profit que la Chine tire de la crise financière mondiale de 2008 ou encore ses stratégies bellicistes sur la scène internationale. Nous emmenant au coeur des villages les plus reculés comme dans les spectaculaires métropoles industrielles et commerciales, Frank Dikötter raconte une histoire faite d'intrigues politiques et de purges anti-corruption pour dévoiler les ambitions économiques, diplomatiques et militaires du géant asiatique.
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Comment devenir dictateur : le culte de la personnalité aux XXe siècle
Frank Dikötter
- Les arenes
- 20 Octobre 2022
- 9791037507211
Le culte de la personnalité chez les dictateurs a longtemps été considéré comme une dérive mégalomaniaque empreinte de folie et de paranoïa. Pour l'historien Frank Dikötter, la mise en scène de sa propre personne est au contraire indispensable au maintien d'un tyran au pouvoir. Si la terreur et la répression permettent la mise au pas d'un pays, il est nécessaire de contrôler les esprits et de rendre impossible toute rébellion. À travers de nombreux exemples, il décrypte comment huit dictateurs du XXe siècle ont su créer l'illusion d'un soutien populaire et ont réussi à entraîner tout un peuple dans leur folie destructrice.
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CHINA AFTER MAO - THE RISE OF A SUPERPOWER
Frank Dikötter
- Bloomsbury uk
- 29 Septembre 2022
- 9781526634290
In China After Mao , award-winning author Frank Dikotter delves into the history of China under the communist party - from the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 up until the moment when Xi Jinping stepped to the fore in 2012.
It is a fascinating tale of contradictions and illusions; of shadow banking, repeated anti-corruption drives and the existence of extreme state wealth alongside everyday poverty. Dikotter explores the decades of so-called ''Reform and Opening Up'' - a forty-year period that has left China with the lowest proportion of resident foreigners in any country - and the country''s emergence into a post-industrial era. He examines China''s navigation of the 2008 financial crash, its increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world.
Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen municipal and provincial archives, as well as unpublished memoirs, newspaper reports and the secret diaries of Mao''s personal secretary, China After Mao is a brilliantly researched and mesmerizing account of a country in flux - and in crisis.>
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DICTATORS - THE CULT OF PERSONALITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Frank Dikötter
- Bloomsbury uk
- 9 Juillet 2020
- 9781526626998
'Brilliant' NEW STATESMAN , BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Enlightening and a good read' SPECTATOR 'Moving and perceptive' NEW STATESMAN Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti.
No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom.
In How to Be a Dictator , Frank Dikotter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders?
This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.
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'Essential reading' EVENING STANDARD , BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Elegant and readable' THE TIMES ' A whistlestop tour' OBSERVER Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti.
No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom.
In How to Be a Dictator , Frank Dikotter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders?
This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.
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THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: A PEOPLE''S HISTORY, 1962-1976
Frank Dikötter
- Bloomsbury uk
- 7 Février 2017
- 9781408856529
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2017 After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.
When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the marked and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao's regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikotter casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.
Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikotter's extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking 'People's Trilogy' is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People's Republic of China.
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MAO''S GREAT FAMINE - THE HISTORY OF CHINA''S MOST DEVASTATING CATASTROPHE, 1958-62
Frank Dikötter
- Bloomsbury uk
- 20 Août 2010
- 9781408812198
Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. So opens Frank Dikotter's astonishing, riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era. Dikotter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history, as at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death, but also the greatest demolition of real estate in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned into rubble. The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful meshing of exhaustive research and narrative drive, Dikotter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.
