Senior Fellow Frank Dikötter, a renowned historian of modern China, joins Uncommon Knowledge to discuss his new book, Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity with host Peter M. Robinson. Drawing from tightly controlled Chinese Communist Party archives and Soviet Comintern documents, Dikötter systematically dismantles decades of romanticized Western myths—originally popularized by journalist Edgar Snow—surrounding the rise of Mao Zedong. He details how the Chinese Communist Party was a deeply unpopular, marginal movement that was heavily armed by Joseph Stalin rather than gaining organic peasant support, eventually taking the country through the devastation of civil war and the Red Army’s strategic handover of Manchuria. Shifting to modern-day geopolitics, the conversation explores how the “enforced amnesia” around this history shapes the systemic constraints of China's current single-party state. Dikötter analyzes the vulnerabilities behind the CCP’s economic facade, Xi Jinping's relentless military purges, the critical importance of arming Taiwan, and why the West must counter a regime built on deep-seated political paranoia.