In the book, Dikötter challenges the view that the early years of the People's Republic of China were constructive and relatively benign, at least as compared with the destruction of the preceding Chinese Civil War, or the subsequent Great Leap Forward; instead, he describes it as an era of "calculated terror and systematic violence",[1] characterised by indoctrination, ill-conceived economic policies that stunted growth, the uprooting of traditional social relations, and officially mandated "death quotas" that contributed to the unnatural deaths of 5 million people within the first decade of the establishment of the republic.

[3] Following the success of his previous work on the Great Leap Forward, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011, The Tragedy of Liberation has garnered considerable attention in the popular press.

Instead, he tracks the grassroots impact of Communist policies – on farmers, factory workers, industrialists, students, monks – by mining archives and libraries for reports, surveys, speeches and memoirs.

While many journalists celebrate The Tragedy of Liberation in their reviews, most Western historians, political scientists and sociologists offer a much more complicated version of early PRC history that includes diverse experiences and local variations.

His citation, however, refers to my UCLA dissertation, where I discuss how the term land lord (dizhu) was an alien word in the countryside [...] There were, to be sure, many landlords in China.