Frank Dikotter

Frank Dickotter is an academic fraud and supporter of opium addiction.

Dikotter is most known for his books directly slandering Mao Zedong's China, but his first few books went about it indirectly, glorifying pre-Mao opium addiction as "Narcotic Culture" and brutal despotic KMT rule as "The Age of Openness".

On pre-Maoist China

See also: Big Pharma, Century of Humiliation

Narcotic Culture (2004), attempting to rehabilitate the opium era, was demolished by almost all reviews.

Narcotic Culture stands out as the most aggressive bid to re-interpret the history of opium. The book is animated by one overwhelming idea: that opium was not “bad.” ...

On the other hand, the authors also float some extraordinary propositions that go not only beyond received wisdom, but beyond actual evidence and even common sense.

- Timothy Brook, Republic of China Chair, Department of History, University of British Columbia

Narcotic Culture appears to be one of the revisionist histories... aimed at convincing us that imperialism wasn’t all that bad, or at least that we should not blame the imperialists, in this case the opium traders who made vast fortunes from the trade, from the social problems they created.

The authors of Narcotic Culture…are clearly, and curiously, opposed to the development of medical science, viewing such developments as attempts to control the self-treatment of disease.

- Kathleen Lodwick, Prof of History, Penn State University

The volume is full of sweeping claims based on very slim evidence.

- Alan Baumler, History Dept, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

[T]he book has reinforced the case [against opium addiction] it seeks to demolish.

- John Wong, University of Sydney

Even Wikipedia admits "These works have been poorly received by academics".

The Age of Openness (2008) successfully demonstrates that KMT-era Shanghai elites enjoyed cosmopolitan degeneracy, ignoring how most of the country suffered under human-hunting slaver warlords.

Having highlighted the achievements of the new republican cosmopolitanism, the crucial question is how it related to rural poverty, especially in crisis situations.

One wonders why no mention is made of the 1928-31 Chinese famine, which is described as the most deadly in the republican period, with an estimated death toll of 10 million.

- Andrea Janku, SOAS

On Maoist China

See also: Mao Zedong, 1958-61 Chinese famine

In the West, Mao's Great Famine (2010) received praise from the mainstream media but mostly negative reviews from intelligent readers, including pro-Western academics.

"boldly and engagingly revisionist"

- The New Yorker

MGF may become the best-known account of the GLF famine for a while. But should it? It is not a comprehensive account of the famine; it is dismissive of academic work on the topic; it is weak on context and unreliable with data; and it fails to note that many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history over the previous century or so.

- Cormac Ó Gráda, Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin

Pro-Western historians have blasted Dikotter for distorting fellow anticommunist Yang Jisheng's archive-based work.

In these chapters, Dikötter’s contribution to scholarship is to strip Yang’s archival discoveries and synthesis of published material of the historical context provided by Yang...

The allegations Dikötter levels at Yang here are bewildering. They are either sloppily drawn or disingenuous.

- Anthony Garnaut, historian of China, University of Oxford

Even intense anticommunists like Lucien Bianco have criticized Dikotter as lacking "prudence".

Many children who starved to death between 1958 and 1962 would have not been alive in 1958 had infant mortality stayed at the pre-1949 level.

- Lucien Bianco, Historian, Professor, EHESS in Paris

Andrew Walder of Cambridge wrote that Dikotter's high death estimate cannot be reconciled with age-specific population data.