‘Fly Wild Swans’ by Jung Chang

In 1991 a then unknown writer called Jung Chang published a memoir that described her own life up to that point (she was thirty-nine) and those of her mother and grandmother. She was by this time married and living in London, but had grown up in China and had witnessed at first hand many of the most unpleasant aspects of the Cultural Revolution.

Her family was reasonably privileged and well-connected, being communist party people, but increasingly opposed to the direction that Mao’s government was going. The book was an immediate hit. It sold well over ten million copies and was translated into thirty languages. It is very personal and compellingly written, mixing family history with a wider reflection on a crucial period in Chinese history.

Jung Chang went on to publish (with her husband John Halladay) an enormous biography of Chairman Mao in 2005 and another long and detailed life of the Dowager Empress Cixi, subtitled ‘the concubine who launched modern China’ in 2013. She followed this up in 2019 with ‘Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister’ which told the story of three Soong sisters who were born towards the end of the nineteenth century and would each in her very different way (mainly through marriage) go on to help shape the development of modern China in the Twentieth Century. She has now written this further personal memoir which in some ways follows on from Wild Swans, but is principally focused on her own life working as a highly successful writer and influential campaigner on Chinese issues.

Aside from the Mao biography, which has always looked a touch too huge and forbidding to me, I have read all her books.

‘Fly Wild Swans’ is highly readable, and pulls no punches when it comes to discussing the rule of Xi Jinping who came to power in 2021 and oversaw the removal of his term limit in 2018, making him effectively lifetime ruler of China. Jung Chang has been adversely affected by this development personally. Her memoirs and the Mao book are banned in China, and her other books are not widely distributed there. She is not currently able to go to China to visit her now very elderly mother, and found herself obstructed in various ways in the past when carrying out research in China. Moreover, of course, there is the longer-term history of persecution faced by her family at the hands of the Mao regime which she described so memorably in Wild Swans and summarises again here.

A lot of this book is devoted to describing how she and her husband went about researching and writing ‘Mao: The Unknown Story’ which took them over ten years. Aside from trawling through newly opened archives in the 1990s, when China opened up for the first time and began to introduce more liberal reform, they also conducted a vast number of interviews all over the world with people who had known Mao. These ranged from former heads of state and figures such as Henry Kissenger to elderly peasants who recalled aspects of the Long March, as well as one of his widows and his children. Stories like this about how books come to be written are always of interest to me, so I enjoyed these passages a lot. What makes them particularly compelling is her own persistence, courage and refusal to be pushed about, as well as the astonishing strength of her mother who is the very definition of indefatigability.

Where I was less impressed was in the way she treats those who have been critical of her writing, and particularly those who reviewed her Mao book somewhat critically. She rather dismisses the critics as being politically motivated lefties who wanted to hold on to their youthful romantic illusions about Mao and Maoism in the face of evidence that he and it were in fact simply monstrous. This is not wholly fair, because as I remember it, the criticism was not so much political as methodological. Scholars were unhappy with the unscholarly manner in which she went about writing her book, concluding that it should be considered more awork of journalism than serious history. The following passage from Adrian Nathan’s very thorough, fair and extensive review in the London Review of Books in November 2025 nicely sums up some of these very legitimate concerns with the book:

Some of Chang and Halliday’s arguments go beyond the misuse of sources to make claims that are simply unsourced. Perhaps they think these are conclusions that flow self-evidently from the pattern of events. They include claims that Stalin deliberately kept his ambassador away from the Security Council meeting in June 1950 which authorised a UN response to North Korea’s invasion of the South, because he wanted to draw US troops into Korea; that Mao helped cause Stalin’s fatal stroke; that Mao’s remarks to the East German leader Walter Ulbricht about the Great Wall had something to do with Ulbricht’s decision some years later to erect the Berlin Wall; and that Mao started both the Taiwan Strait crises, in 1954 and 1958, in order to provoke an American nuclear threat to China that would in turn put pressure on the Soviet Union to give more help to China’s own atomic bomb programme.

Chang and Halliday’s false claims include the assertion that Mao had planned for some time what became in 1962 the Sino-Indian border war, and, as part of this, a ‘hefty horse-trade’ occurred in which Khrushchev told the outgoing Chinese ambassador that Moscow would take China’s side if war broke out with India in return for Mao’s support for the Russian position on missiles in Cuba. But according to their own source, Mao’s ambassador reported these Russian protestations to Beijing as a hypocritical attempt to mask a growing alignment with India. Chang and Halliday further imply that Khrushchev’s promise of support helped Mao decide to give ‘the go-ahead for crack troops to storm Indian positions’; they fail to provide the important background information that, to quote an authoritative study by John Garver, Nehru had previously ‘ordered Indian forces to advance into disputed areas and clear Chinese forces, though without firing first. India ignored Chinese warnings to halt this “forward policy”,’ and only then did the Red Army strike ‘suddenly with overwhelming force’.

Chang and Halliday state that on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, flew to Sichuan for secret talks with the purged general Peng Dehuai. Their source confirms that this meeting took place. But they misreport what the source says, claiming that the meeting was conducted ‘in secret’ (their italics), whereas it was arranged by the local Party secretary, Li Jingquan, as indeed it would have had to have been under the bureaucratic system operating in China at that time, although Li and Peng Zhen agreed not to report the meeting to Beijing. ‘What the two Pengs talked about has never been revealed,’ Chang and Halliday write, although the book they cite contains four pages of reconstructed dialogue. ‘Judging from the timing and the colossal risk Mayor Peng took in visiting’ Peng Dehuai, they say, ‘it is highly likely that they discussed the feasibility of using the army to stop Mao.’ Nothing of that sort is indicated in their source, which says that the two discussed an ideological campaign then unfolding in Beijing. It is unlikely that the two discussed military options, because neither of them – a civilian official and a purged general – had any access at all to troops.

Chang and Halliday report the case of a brigadier general called Cai Tiegen, who thought of organising a guerrilla force to resist Mao during the Cultural Revolution and was shot for that crime. Their source, however, states that Cai was the victim of a frame-up by a political activist, who distorted some discussions between Cai and his friends about guerrilla warfare to create the false impression that Cai wanted to form guerrilla bands to oppose the regime.

Further examples follow, and they do I all honesty serve somewhat to undermine confidence in Jung Chang as a historian.

But surely that is not what she is necessarily claiming to be? She is writing history, but makes no pretensions to be doing so as an academic or as an impartial commentator. It is all deeply personal to her, and her work is compelling precisely for that reason.

By any standards her life has been extraordinary and her achievements as a writer of popular but serious books about China second-to-none. She has been hugely influential in shaping Western views about China and will, I am sure, continue to do so for a long time to come.