10 September 2025

Jung Chang’s critical distance

In her sequel to Wild Swans, the exiled author reflects on China from her adopted British home.

During his three decades at the helm of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong never once showered, bathed, or brushed his teeth. But poor hygiene was the least of his crimes. He incited a decades-long class war, bred a culture of fear, and starved his own people. “With all these projects,” he remarked, “half of China may well have to die.”

The world glimpsed that reality in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991), a family saga spanning three generations of women. It begins in imperial China with Chang’s grandmother, left forever crippled by foot-binding at the age of two. After the Qing dynasty fell, her daughter (Chang’s mother) was born into a country ravaged by civil war. Drawn to the promise of the Communist Party, she fought Japan and the nationalist Kuomintang in the hope of building a fairer China. That dream never materialised.

Chang’s father was a senior official in Sichuan, and his stalwart commitment to the party often came at the expense of his family. He evicted his mother and handed over her home to the authorities; meanwhile, when his wife became pregnant during the Long March, he refused to allow her to ride in the rickshaw with him, causing her to go into premature labour – the baby died soon after birth. Later, his own life would also be brought to an early end: he died at the age of 54 following years of mental and physical torture at the hands of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

Wild Swans, banned in China, became an international phenomenon: it was translated into 40 languages and sold 15 million copies. George HW Bush, who headed the CIA in 1976 (the year Mao died), told Chang the agency had little idea of what life was really like in China under the communist leader. “If we did, Wild Swans would not have been such a surprise to us.”

More than 30 years later, Chang has returned to her story with Fly, Wild Swans, this time viewing China largely from her adopted home of Britain, where, in 1978, she became one of the first Chinese students to attend a UK university – a freedom that was hard won, but for the first year was stifled by the long reach of the Chinese Communist Party. Students were not allowed to leave their lodgings without permission, and even then, never on their own. Curtains were to remain closed, and the sole clothes permitted were state-tailored Mao suits. But things began to change dramatically under the direction of Deng Xiaoping, whose post-Mao reforms introduced a degree of liberalisation. Under Deng, China boomed into the mega-economy it is today.

This global and economic opening up, combined with a previously suppressed appetite for wealth, set off a nationwide scramble to get rich. Because of her rare international status, Chang was often put in touch with those trying to do business with the West, who hoped she could help them “set up an airline? Build hovercrafts for the Yangtze? Mine the Himalayas for marble?”

It was a family friend, Deng Xiaoping’s half-sister “Auntie Deng”, who in 1985 suggested that Chang write about the revolutionary statesman. The project was never realised, and Chang came to the conclusion that it would require “monumental research to undo the brainwashing in order to write a good book about a major [CCP] leader”. After the publication of Wild Swans, she was ready. However, instead of focusing on Deng, she went straight to the eye of the storm with Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), a biography co-written with her historian husband, Jon Halliday. After her account of the “evil” Mao was published, the state clamped down: on visits to China she was flanked by two minders from the state security ministry.

Under Xi Jinping’s tenure as leader, her relationship with China has only worsened. She hoped to return every year to see her ageing mother, but her visas have been repeatedly denied. The last time she visited was in 2018, the year when Xi, a “princeling” of the Mao era, announced himself as permanent leader.

On one of her final visits to China, Chang was greeted at the airport by signs promising dire consequences for anyone bringing in books or magazines published outside of the country. She was then handled and “humiliated” in front of crowds with “mercilessness”. “I felt the ghost of Mao hovering,” she recalled. In early September, Xi was recorded telling Vladimir Putin that with advances in medicine, “humans might soon live to 150”. With a leader chasing immortality, perhaps a ghost is no threat at all.

Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China
Jung Chang
William Collins, 336pp, £25

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[See also: My night dancing with Nigel Farage]