This book presents and explains a chapter in human history of extreme suffering inflicted by extreme cruelty. The specifics are very Chinese but the lessons behind them are not. This writing coincides with the world community's anguish for the events raging on in Darfur and its most significant attempt to intervene yet: the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for genocide. Only the future will tell whether this is an effective course of action, although some scholars and humanitarian groups have already complained that, in fact, the indictment may alienate a government whose cooperation must be sought. Since the United Nations adopted its convention on genocide in 1948, the record of intervention has not been encouraging.

One of the lessons I attempt to extract from the Chinese case is that collective killing, mass killing, or genocide is, according to Scott Straus, “a massively complex social phenomenon.” This understanding requires us to look beyond the “genocidal policy,” if there is any, of a rogue state. Short of regime change, it may be more effective to engage the government at issue than to alienate it because the government is the most capable agent of affecting other social factors that have implications on the outcome. In his groundbreaking work on the Rwanda genocide, Straus writes: “Genocide is ultimately about how ordinary people come to see fellow citizens, neighbors, friends, loved ones, and even children as ‘enemies’ who must be killed.”