Global Roaming with Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald Your Call: The history of China the CCP would rather not tell
Mar 16, 2026
Frank Dikötter, leading historian of modern China known for digging up internal CCP archives. He recounts finding smuggled party volumes and why official narratives matter for today. He traces China’s shift from empire to republic, the rehabilitation of Confucian rhetoric, and how nationalism and Western misreading shaped the rise of the CCP.
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Smuggled Central Archives Revealed Hidden CCP Records
- Frank Dikötter discovered 300 internal Communist Party volumes smuggled into Hong Kong that record Party documents from 1921–1949.
- These unpublished central-archive compilations, produced in the 1980s for leadership eyes only, revealed primary evidence contradicting standard Party narratives.
How Smuggled Volumes Made Research Possible
- Frank Dikötter recounts that the 300 central-party volumes ended up in Hong Kong because they were smuggled out, calling Hong Kong 'the Berlin of the East.'
- He attributes his research access and luck to those smuggled compilations produced without anticipating their exile.
Chinese Characteristics Rooted In Wartime Strategy
- Mao adapted communism to Chinese conditions by emphasizing peasants over proletariat starting in 1943, mirroring Stalin's advice to local communist parties.
- This 'Chinese characteristics' framing set a continuous precedent from Mao to Xi for tailoring ideology to local culture.
