Frank Dikötter is also the author ofHow to be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century, Frank takes a closer look at how eight dictators, from Hitler and Stalin to Mao, managed to acquire power and keep it. The book was listed as one of the Books of the Year ...
The problem with Chiang Kai-shek was not that he was a dictator: no other sort of government was likely to work in China as it then was. Sun Yatsen had officially set out that there would be a period of ‘tutelage’ before eventually moving to a multi-party Western system. But Sun Y...
Similarly, the fact that the police action of 1937 continued for so long, in company with equally self-contradictory political acts, makes it unlikely that we are dealing here with a victorious punitive expedition being carried through by the praetorian guard of an all-powerful dictator. Ritters...
I was quite a fan at the time, or just afterwards really (that’s usually my way – dismiss the current thing and then, upon reflection, realize it was ace). I liked a couple of tracks second time around but I am far more into it now than I was back then. perspective, I guess...
He could have made himself more popular among the current elite by claiming he cunningly strung along a mad dictator, managing not just to contain the Soviet Union and Communist Vietnam but also pave the way for Deng to save China. But I assume he knows better and sees no need to ...
“That was probably the key catalyst to the great growth spurts of double-digit growth for a decade or more – because of that integration,” said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, author of a 2005 biography, “The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin.” ...