After almost half a century in London, one of the delights Jung Chang misses most about her home city of Chengdu in southwest China is the silk, which is among the softest anywhere in the world. Long a way of life in the city, the provincial capital of Sichuan, Chengdu’s silk industry has faced tough competition in recent years from artificial fabrics.
“One of my earliest childhood memories was making silk, gathering armfuls of mulberry leaves, feeling the fluffy downside of the leaves, and feeding them to hungry silkworms,” says Chang.
“Eventually, very quickly, actually, they started to spout from their tiny plump lips, the thin, silk fabric. The trick for the softening of the silk is the length: the longer it is, the softer the material would turn out to be.”
Chang wrote about her childhood in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, which was translated into 37 languages and sold more than 13 million copies, making it the most successful Chinese book internationally in recent decades. Published in 1991, it told the story of Chang’s grandmother, who was a concubine to a Chinese warlord; her mother, who was an early Communist Party member; and herself.
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Now Chang has published a sequel, Fly, Wild Swans, which takes up her story from 1978 when she left China to study in England and revisits in greater detail some of the episodes in the earlier book. It also describes the process of researching her most controversial book Mao: The Unknown Story, which Chang wrote with her Dundalk-born husband, Jon Halliday.
Chang is speaking to me by video from her home in London because she has felt unable to visit China since 2018, fearful that if she does she might not be allowed to leave again. This is how she stays in touch with her mother, De-hong, who is 94 and living in a care home in Chengdu.
“She’s being well looked after, but obviously I can’t have a proper conversation with her,” Chang says.
De-hong has never read any of Chang’s books, although she is a central figure in both Wild Swans and Fly, Wild Swans, emerging as a woman of remarkable courage and resourcefulness. She decided against reading Wild Swans because she believed she might disagree with some of it and did not want her daughter to worry about what she thought.
“Also bear in mind, all my books are banned and she lives in China. She constantly has to think about if she was interrogated about my books. In order to avoid pressure being put on her to stop me from writing what I wanted to write, she just says she doesn’t read my books. She never interferes with the lives of her children.”
Despite her books being banned, Chang was able to visit China regularly after the publication of Wild Swans and even after her Mao biography appeared in 2005. Over the years, she formed mutually respectful relationships with Communist Party officials, including those from the ministry of state security.
Although she is fiercely critical of the system in China, Chang portrays the people she meets there as multidimensional, regardless of their ideological outlook.
“I don’t think the Communist Party is like a slab of stone and that everybody is the same, far from it,” she says.
“I mean, people are human beings. If you get to know them, you know whatever their ideology, whatever their beliefs, they’re all human beings. That’s the aspect that attracts me. I write, of course, what I see, how I feel.”
For many years, Chinese people were not allowed to marry foreigners, and even associating with them was asking for trouble. Chang believes that this has led to the creation of what she calls a wall between Chinese people and outsiders, making it more difficult for foreigners to understand them in all their humanness.
“The Chinese often did not reveal their true human side to westerners and tended to show a more sterilised side, either as a stereotyped party official or a stereotyped rich man or a stereotyped dissident,” she says. “I think they somehow tend do a bit of acting unconsciously to suit their interlocutor. They tend to say what they think the foreigners expect to hear.”
[ Jung Chang: ‘I’m very wary about the role of written history’Opens in new window ]
Chang’s biography of Mao portrayed him as a tyrant who was motivated solely by the pursuit of power and enjoyed a life of privilege and luxury while his people suffered. The book drew criticism from western China experts as well as from Beijing, but this did not stop Chang from returning to the country to visit her family.
In 2018, Xi Jinping proposed that insulting and slandering “heroes and martyrs” should become a criminal offence. Three years later, the National People’s Congress passed a law that made such an offence punishable by up to three years in prison, “criminal detention, public surveillance or deprivation of political rights”.
Chang feared that her Mao book could make her vulnerable to prosecution under the measure, despite the fact that it was published so long ago. Her suspicion appeared to have been confirmed in August 2024 when Gao Zhen, a Chinese artist based in the United States, was detained during a visit to his family in Hebei province.
Gao, who remains in detention, was arrested on suspicion of insulting and slandering heroes and martyrs and his wife and child were forbidden from leaving China to return to the US. Decades ago, Gao and his brother Qiang produced works satirising Mao.
“They were quite well known because they sculpted a lot of Mao statues which were deemed offensive,” Chang says. “Since then, they didn’t do anything. They weren’t dissidents or anything.
“I mean, even he was arrested. I then have to think about me because I’m one of the biographers of Mao. I think it’s as though the law was written very much with me as a target.”
Chang complains that Xi is trying to turn the clock back in China to something closer to the state Mao envisaged. But while Mao embraced chaos during the Cultural Revolution, Xi prioritises order and security.
Like Chang, Xi suffered during the Cultural Revolution and both had fathers who were purged under Mao. But she sees Xi as part of a cadre of sons of senior Communist Party figures who saw their destiny as safeguarding the state that Mao created.
“This idea that the, the children of high officials, should particularly prepare themselves to be the successors of the red dynasty, red state, was indoctrinated into us in the 1960s, just before the Cultural Revolution, there was a lot of talk about it,” she says. “In fact, Mao used them to be the first Red Guards. The very early Red Guards were organised by the children of the communist officials, high officials.
“At the beginning, it seemed to me also to be bizarre. But then when I thought of it, I realised that it was actually quite natural. It wasn’t surprising because the older communist generation, like Mr Xi’s father, they all lived through purges. The father was purged many times and suffered tremendously and was nearly buried alive when he was 22. The father didn’t turn against the Communist Party, he didn’t turn against Mao.”
Chang says she knew many people from this group and that suffering, purges, torture and even death was part of Communist Party ideology. And she points out that even Mao’s more liberal successors like Deng Xiaoping were steeped in the same tradition.
“Like the Mao apologists often say, you can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg,” she says. “They all just wanted to break the eggs more gently and perhaps fewer.
“The red state has brought all these communists, high officials and their children, a lot of suffering, but also a lot of privilege. And the Chinese reforms have been conducted under the party. So the smart ones of the party elite, the princelings, got cushy jobs in the state-owned enterprises which controlled all the key industries. Even in the private sector, private businessmen invariably had to associate themselves with some high official’s children in order to get on. They have a lot of material advantages, thanks to being part of the Communist Party. If they turned their back on Mao, on the Communist Party, they would lose all that advantage as well.”
China has been transformed since Chang left in 1978, with hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty and a mass migration from the countryside into the cities. Average life expectancy has increased by more than a decade and the lives of most Chinese people have improved dramatically.
Chang acknowledges the changes, but her view of China sometimes seems not to register their impact on how younger Chinese people perceive their relative place in the world.
“Just think people risk their lives to come to Europe, to come to America, to come to the West. Nobody tries to go to China,” she says. “The desperate people who try to settle in the West, I think, mostly want a better life for their children.”
Some Chinese people still want to move to the West to pursue wealth and to enjoy the kind of liberal democratic freedoms that are not available in China, but most prefer to stay in their own country. And although few westerners want to live in China, a growing number of young graduates from the Global South choose to do so.
Chang sees no prospect of a return to China while Xi remains in office, but she has not given up all hope of coming back to visit the silk shops of Chengdu.
“One must never say never. I hope I will, which is why I keep my optimism going. Because optimism is in my nature, it came with me,” she says.
“I want to have hope which is grounded, which is rooted in a calculation or analysis of reality, but which keeps me going. You will only fight if there is hope. You don’t fight for doom. You fight for hope.”
