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At the invitation of the Chancellor of The University of Oxford, Lord Patten of Barnes, the leading historian of modern China Professor Frank Dikötter talks about his defining trilogy of works on the turbulent recent history of the country and about the future of Hong Kong and the Chinese state.

Dikötter has drawn on newly opened party archives, secret police reports, interviews and memoirs to trace the history of modern China from the hoisting of the red flag over Beijing’s Forbidden City by Mao Zedong in 1949, through the great famine that saw 45 million Chinese worked, starved or beaten to death, to the brutal purges of the Cultural Revolution. The story is covered in three volumes, The Tragedy of Liberation, the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning Mao’s Great Famine, and the newly published The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976.

Dikötter is chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and formerly professor of the modern history of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has published nine books about the history of China, which have been instrumental in changing the way historians view modern China.