"The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings." -- Jung Chang
Jung Chang (, born March 25, 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan) is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in mainland China.
Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the British historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005 and is a highly critical description of Mao Zedong's life and work.
"Although my book is banned I am still allowed to go to China and travel. There is no longer the kind of control that Mao used to have-there have been deep fundamental changes in society.""At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.""China is more prosperous than before. The people have better lives but they are not happy and confident because the scars are still there.""For anyone to open their heart, they need the right atmosphere, and something to prompt them. For my mother it was her trip abroad: she was in a very relaxed, understanding environment. I was very sympathetic towards her.""I always wanted to be a writer.""I feel perhaps my heart is still in China.""I like to have Chinese furniture in my home as a constant and painful reminder of how much has been destroyed in China. The contrast between the beauty of the past and the ugliness of the modern is nowhere sharper than in China.""I no longer have the terrible nightmares that I used to have. Mao had just died in 1976, and China began to open up. For the first time scholarships to go to the West to study were awarded on academic merit.""I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet.""I think because of their terrible past, particularly this century, the Chinese have come to accept cruelty more than many other people, which is something I feel very unhappy about.""I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.""I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.""If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else.""In certain areas where the media are still controlled, the changes have come to a halt, which is a very frustrating situation. I would like the changes to take place throughout China.""It's taken us 10 years, and it was constant excitement. I was constantly shocked by how evil he could be. Mao was very, very shrewd but he didn't have human feeling.""We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings and consequently, some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves.""What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.""When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.""While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister."
Chang was born March 25, 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China. Her parents were both Communist Party of China officials, and her father was greatly interested in literature. She quickly developed a love of reading and writing, composing poetry as a child.
As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father became successful as a propagandist at a regional level. His formal ranking was as a "level 10 official", meaning that he was one of 20,000 or so most important cadres, or ganbu, in the country. The Communist Party provided her family with a dwelling in a guarded, walled compound, a maid and chauffeur, as well as a wet-nurse and nanny for the children. This level of privilege in China's relatively impoverished 1950s was extraordinary.
Her given name, Er-hong (?? "Second Swan"), sounded like the Chinese word for "faded red". As communists were "deep red", the young Er-hong, at the age of 12, asked her father to give her a new name. She wanted a name with "a military ring to it." He suggested "Jung", which means "martial affairs."
The Cultural Revolution
Like many of her peers, Chang chose to become a Red Guard at the age of 14, during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. In Wild Swans she said she was "keen to do so", "thrilled by my red armband". In her memoirs, Chang states that she refused to participate in the attacks on her teachers and other Chinese, and she left after a short period as she found the Red Guards too violent.
The failures of the Great Leap Forward had led her parents to oppose Mao Zedong's policies. They were targeted during the Cultural Revolution, as most high-ranking officials were. When Chang's father criticized Mao by name, Chang writes in Wild Swans that this exposed them to retaliation from Mao Zedong's supporters. Her parents were publicly humiliated — ink was poured over their heads, they were forced to wear placards denouncing them around their necks, kneel in gravel and to stand outside in the rain — followed by imprisonment, her father's treatment leading to lasting physical and mental illness. Their careers were destroyed, and her family was forced to leave their home.
Before her parents' denunciation and imprisonment, Chang had unquestioningly supported Mao and criticized herself for any momentary doubts. But by the time of his death, her respect for Mao, she writes, had been destroyed. Chang wrote that when she heard he had died, she had to bury her head in the shoulder of another student to pretend she was grieving. She explained her change on the stance of Mao with the following comments:
Studying English
The disruption of the university system by the Red Guards led Chang, like most of her generation, away from the political maelstroms of the academy. Instead, she spent several years as a peasant, a barefoot doctor (a part-time peasant doctor), a steelworker and an electrician, though she received no formal training because of Mao's policy, which did not require formal instruction as a prerequisite for such work.
The universities were eventually re-opened and she gained a place at Sichuan University to study English, later becoming an assistant lecturer there. After Mao's death, she passed an exam which allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was politically rehabilitated.
Chang left China in 1978 to study in Britain on a government scholarship, staying first in Soho, London. She later moved to Yorkshire, studying linguistics at the University of York with a scholarship from the university itself, living in Derwent College. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from York in 1982, becoming the first person from the People's Republic of China to be awarded a Ph.D. from a British university. In 1986, she and Jon Halliday published Mme Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ching-ling), a biography of Sun Yat-Sen's widow.
She has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Buckingham, the University of York, the University of Warwick, and the Open University. She lectured for some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before retiring in the 1990s to concentrate on her writing.
New experiences
In 2003, Jung Chang wrote a new foreword to Wild Swans, describing her early life in Britain and explaining why she wrote the book. Having lived in China during the 1960s and 1970s, she found Britain exciting. After the initial culture-shock, she soon grew to love the country, especially its diverse range of culture, literature and arts. She found even colourful window-boxes worth writing home about - Hyde Park and the Kew Gardens were inspiring. She took every opportunity to watch Shakespeare's plays in both London and York. However she still has a special place for China in her heart, saying in an interview with HarperCollins, "I feel perhaps my heart is still in China".
Chang lives in west London with her husband, the British historian Jon Halliday, who specializes in Soviet history. She regularly visits mainland China to see her family and friends there, with permission from the Chinese authorities, despite carrying out research on her biography of Mao there.
Celebrity
The publication of Jung Chang's second book Wild Swans made her a celebrity. Chang's unique style, using a personal description of the life of three generations of Chinese women to highlight the many changes that the country went through, proved to be highly successful. Large numbers of sales were generated, and the book's popularity led to it being sold around the world and translated into several languages.
Chang became a popular figure for talks about Communist China, and she has travelled across Britain, Europe, America, as well as the rest of the world. She returned to the University of York on June 14, 2005 to address the university's debating union and spoke to an audience of over 300, most of whom were students. The BBC invited her onto the panel of Question Time for a first-ever broadcast from Shanghai on 10 March 2005, but she was unable to attend when she broke her leg a few days beforehand.
The international bestseller is a biography of three generations of Chinese women in 20th century China — her grandmother, mother, and herself. Chang paints a vivid portrait of the political and military turmoil of China in this period, from the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord, to her mother's experience of Japanese-occupied Jinzhou during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and her own experience of the effects of Mao's policies of the 1950s and 1960s.
Wild Swans was translated into 30 languages and sold 10 million copies, receiving praise from authors such as J. G. Ballard. It is banned in mainland China, though two pirated versions are available, as are translations in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Kaz Ross of the University of Tasmania deemed Wild Swans to have been a forerunner of a new genre: "'faction' — history told by fictional narrative means." (unpublished)
Mao: The Unknown Story
Chang's latest work, a biography of Mao, was co-authored by her husband Jon Halliday and portrays Mao in an extremely negative light. The couple travelled all over the world to research the book which took 12 years to write. They interviewed hundreds of people who had known Mao including George Bush, Sr., Henry Kissinger, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama.
Amongst their criticism of Mao, Chang and Halliday argue that despite being born into a rich peasant family, he had little concern for the welfare of the Chinese peasantry. They hold Mao responsible for the famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward and claim that he exacerbated the famine by allowing the export of grain to continue when China did not have sufficient grain to feed its population. They also claim that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, including some of his personal friends, and argue that he was a more tyrannical leader than had previously been thought.
Mao: The Unknown Story became a bestseller, with UK sales alone reaching 60,000 in six months. Academics and commentators wrote reviews ranging from great praise to serious criticism. While general media publications tended to praise the book, scholars specialising on the subject questioned the factual accuracy of some of Chang and Halliday's conclusions, and pointed out their selective use of evidence. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that while few commentators "disput[ed] the subject," "some of the world's most eminent scholars of modern Chinese history" had referred to the book as "a gross distortion of the records."
List of works
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Madame Sun Yat-Sen: Soong Ching-Ling (London, 1986); Penguin, ISBN 0-14-008455-X
Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (London, 1992); 2004 Harper Perennial ed. ISBN 0-00-717615-5
Jung Chang, Lynn Pan and Henry Zhao (edited by Jessie Lim and Li Yan), Another province: new Chinese writing from London (London, 1994); Lambeth Chinese Community Association, ISBN 0-9522973-0-2.
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, The Unknown Story (London, 2005); Jonathan Cape, ISBN 0-679-42271-4
