The rise of modern China is arguably the greatest and most consequential story of our time. And as Frank Dikotter highlights in his new book, China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, it is a tale of greed, violence, and inequality. The great historian of the Mao era has now moved to our own time, and he comes to the present day with a warning. By banking on the Chinese Communist Party somehow liberalizing, the West has made one of the gravest miscalculations in modern history. One would have to go back to the policy of appeasement in the 1930s to find something similar — and even then, it ...