Jung Chang’s book Wild Swans (1991) is a global phenomenon. As of last year, it had sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Its author has been honoured and celebrated in her adopted country, Britain, most recently with a CBE. In her homeland, China, her position is more ambiguous. 

The success of Wild Swans took the publishing world by surprise. It was not the first memoir of a Chinese person who had lived through the Cultural Revolution to be published in English. Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai (1986) revealed to Westerners the horrors of Mao’s overturning of society during the turbulent period 1966–76, and the book won praise and awards. But something about Wild Swans appealed to a wider readership. Jung Chang told the story not only of her own experiences, but of the lives of her mother and grandmother too. Her grandmother was married off to a warlord. Her mother married a virtuous but austere Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official, whose faith in the party was shaken as he witnessed the growing authoritarianism and violence of Mao’s regime. Jung Chang herself joined the Red Guards and took part in the frenzied Mao-worship of that era. But within a few years, she felt that her actions had been pointless, and she turned to education to find a new way forward. She was one of the first Chinese students to come to the UK during the era of Deng Xiaoping’s reforming rule and gained a PhD in linguistics at York University. A few years later, she wrote Wild Swans. 

In the years since Wild Swans appeared, Chang has written three books on modern Chinese history. Her biography of Mao, published in 2005, has proved the most controversial. Some have praised the detailed work done by Chang and her co-author, her husband the historian Jon Halliday, some of it in