CHINA AFTER MAO: The rise of a superpower, by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury, $36.99)
Frank Dikötter, a historian of modern China, has a relatively simple method for research. He travels to local and provincial archives to seek access to papers. In Beijing, his request might be referred up the Chinese bureaucracy, eventually ending in a no. But in local archives, he is granted access more often than not.
So Dikötter, the Dutch-born professor of humanities at the University of Hong, he arrived at a very different – and much higher – figure of the number of Chinese who starved to death in the 1950s (45 million) by counting from local sources, rather than relying on records in the capital.
