From a dusty boardroom with 13 delegates in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party's rise to rule over the country by 1949 was highly improbable.
But, as Stanford University historian and author Frank Dikötter explains the party benefited from wars, invasions and outside help to claim power.
And it was unapologetic in its use of violence and repression on its path there, Frank says.
The author has trawled through thousands of files from the archives of the Party to tell this story, following his earlier The People's Trilogy, using the same archives to document the lives of ordinary people living under Mao.
Frank is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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