Jung Chang is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Empress Dowager Cixi, and Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, as well as Mao: The Unknown Story, with her husband, Jon Halliday. Her latest book is Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jung Chang discuss how personal stories illuminate broader historical truths, the culture of mistrust that has characterized Chinese society across centuries, and why young Chinese people today are increasingly rejecting marriage and romantic relationships.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You have a very personal way of describing a very broad swath of Chinese history. What do you think we miss when we look at the history of a country that has been written through revolutions, political intrigue, and defenestrations at the level of high politics? Why do we need to look at the lives of individual Chinese people to illuminate the history of this country?
Jung Chang: I actually did write some history books that do not look at history through my own perspective. I would like to write about my family, about my mother, my grandmother, my father, and now myself, in part. I think people can identify with individuals. In that way, history comes more alive than when you write about it in a non-personal way.
Wild Swans has been read by tens of millions of people. I’ve received thousands of letters, and they moved me very much because I feel that readers identify with our stories. In 2023, I felt that I would like to write a sequel to Wild Swans, a sequel that is also a book in its own right. I am looking forward to very personal reactions from readers.
Mounk: One thing that strikes me about Wild Swans and now the sequel is the attempt to show the effect of history on the lives of individuals. That’s something I’m drawn to, whether in straightforward history books, fiction, or narrative historical work like the kind you’re engaged in. What I find most moving is seeing how the lives of rather ordinary individuals, and sometimes very heroic individuals, are shaped by big historical events that are outside of their control.
Do you think this divides, at least a little, countries that have experienced very large, traumatic historical events from countries that have been relatively more placid? I find a real contrast between American literature, for example, and some European literature, as well as a lot of Chinese literature, in this sensibility. I often struggle to engage with American fiction because it is, in a quintessential sense, and I know I’m simplifying, about people who grew up in affluent suburbs, struggling with the limitations of those suburbs, and trying to discover themselves as individuals. I’m struck by the contrast with the ways writers grapple with history in works about China and about twentieth-century European history.
Chang: When I was writing Fly Wild Swans, as well as when I was writing Wild Swans, I focused on our stories and our feelings. I realized, over time, that history is never far away from our lives. It is the background, and in many ways our lives interact with the greater landscape of history. In that way, I write my personal story, but the readers get to know something about history as well. They can also feel things which you cannot get when you write just about history.
My family is, in a way, quite extraordinary. My grandmother, my mother, and my father are all extraordinary people. They often swim against the tidal waves of history, which makes them interesting and generates more drama. If you are against the prevalent trend of history at a particular time, you are going to come across bigger waves and bigger dramas. So I think that, because I am writing about this family, there are a lot of dramatic events.
Mounk: As you point out, Wild Swans was read by tens of millions of people around the world, and I am sure many listeners of the podcast will have read the book or heard of it. But for those who have not, it is a story of your family, in particular three generations of women in that family, your grandmother, your mother, and yourself.
One thing that struck me is the brutality of your grandmother’s life and the hardships suffered by your mother, but also a more general sense of harshness in Chinese society that you also see in other forms of Chinese literature. We sometimes have a tendency to associate this with communist rule and the Cultural Revolution, all of which you write about in a very incisive way. But even before the communists took power, there was a sense of deep disempowerment.
That sense is certainly present for the women protagonists in your book, who live in a very patriarchal society, but it also touches many of the other characters—many of the men in the family as well.
Chang: Yes, you are absolutely right. Brutality and cruelty did not come with communism. My grandmother suffered foot binding when she was two years old. She was born in 1909, so that was long before that period. Foot binding I knew about when I was a child, but I actually saw my grandmother’s feet, which were horrendous to look at. Only the two big toes were normal. The other four toes on each foot were lifeless. There were no bones in them. They were crushed and bent under the arch of her feet. I saw my grandmother flipping them up and cutting the toenails on those lifeless, boneless toes, toenails that must have dug into the sole of her feet.
My mother later gave me a description of how these feet were created. One day, many years later, my mother was visiting me in London. We were walking in Hyde Park, and she suddenly stopped and pointed at a round, flat stone on the ground. She said, “Look at that stone. It looks just like a millstone, and that’s the kind of stone people used to put on baby girls’ feet to produce the three-inch golden lilies.”
Three-inch golden lilies is the beautiful name for very cruelly made bound feet. This practice had existed for a thousand years. Chinese women had suffered this extremely cruel mutilation, which was extremely painful, for a thousand years. My grandmother had her feet bound when she was two years old. The foot binding was carried out by her own mother. She screamed. She fainted. She tried to crawl away but could not, because her feet were under that millstone. She begged her mother to stop, and her mother wept and said, “I am doing this for your own good, because otherwise, when you grow up, you will have big feet and you will not find a husband.” My grandmother lived with that pain all her life.
Mounk: One of the things that really strikes me in reading Wild Swans is the harshness of interpersonal relations. Some of that comes from straightforward injustices that easily come to mind, like foot binding, which is, of course, a horrible and cruel practice. As you point out, it existed within a web of social expectations. If you wanted to be a desirable woman, which was the only real way to guarantee any amount of personal comfort in that time period, then you needed to have your feet bound. So even a loving mother might decide to engage in this cruel practice because she was convinced, and perhaps not entirely wrongly, that under the prevailing social circumstances this was the best path for her daughter to have a decent life.
We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
But you see it in other ways as well. Many of the households you describe, where your grandmother lived and your mother grew up, are quite cold. They are characterized by intrigue and mutual distrust. Servants are often described as being prone to making false accusations that the lady of the house was cheating on her husband, either to avenge some slight or perhaps to receive some kind of reward for revealing this supposed fact.
This is something that also strikes me when reading someone like Lu Xun, who is writing in a very different register and writing fictional stories, whereas you are writing a personal history that is deeply researched. As a reader, there is something striking about an atmosphere in which there is an assumption that people cannot trust each other, that relationships are quite transactional, and that even though family and social networks play a huge role in society, they are not based on affection.
It contrasts interestingly with the atmosphere in another very successful writer who writes about women and is often read as a feminist writer: Elena Ferrante. There, too, you have cruel conditions, a lot of violence, and a lot of poverty, in a very different decade and a very different place. But there is a warmth to human relations that I find interestingly absent, whether in the fiction of Lu Xun or in your descriptions of China in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
It is something I have been wondering about even before this conversation. I wonder whether you share that sense. Am I picking up on something that you also see, and what is the reason for that?
Chang: I think you’re absolutely right. I noticed that myself as well. In fact, that is also a feeling I often had when I read Chinese literature, and I still have those feelings now. In my own family, there are both cases.
In my grandmother’s case, at the age of fifteen, she was given by her father to a warlord general to be his concubine. Her daughter was taken away from her because the daughter was supposed to be brought up by the proper wife and not by a concubine. My mother was not allowed to call her mother “mother.” So my grandmother one night kidnapped my mother and fled that well-guarded mansion. It was a lot of hardship to flee because she had crippled bound feet, and the way from the mansion to the railway station was full of spiky rocks.
Because she had been a concubine, she was despised. Later, after the warlord died, when she fell in love with a doctor practicing Chinese medicine and they wanted to get married, Dr. Xia’s extended family were all against the marriage because a concubine becoming the proper wife was supposed to bring shame to the Xia family. The eldest son of Dr. Xia was so furious that he shot himself in protest. He did not mean to die, but he had an infection.
Life for my mother growing up in that family was hell. She was ruthlessly bullied. Nobody had any smile when they looked at my mother or when they looked at my grandmother. The children bullied my mother and once pushed her down a well, and she could have been killed. It was a family full of pitiless horror.
So much so that Dr. Xia, at the age of sixty-six, left his extended family and moved with my grandmother and my mother to another city to start a new life. They were very poor. To pacify his old family, he did not bring any money. He gave them all the money and property. They started their life in a slum. Later, because he was an excellent doctor, they were able to move into a bigger house.
All those years, his own family never visited him except one son and one grandson. So that was another horrible family. But perhaps because of that background, my grandmother and my mother made my own family, with my parents, my siblings, and my grandmother, a particularly loving one. When I was growing up, I had nothing but love from my grandmother and from my parents.
My grandmother, as I wrote in this new book, Fly Wild Swans, did not permit my parents to criticize their children at the dinner table. She said you must not upset them when they are eating, because that would make them ill. She was the wife of a doctor practicing Chinese medicine, and she believed that children must not be upset, particularly when they were eating food. My parents never said harsh words to me. Even occasional disapproving words were phrased delicately, as if I were a sensitive adult who could be easily offended. So I grew up in this incredibly loving family.
When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, when I was fourteen, I saw many children turning on their parents, wives turning on their husbands, or vice versa. I saw boys beating up their fathers when their fathers became victims of the Cultural Revolution. But my family grew closer.
At the age of fourteen or fifteen, my life revolved around my parents. I went with my mother to denunciation meetings. You have seen those horrible scenes of victims being put on the stage, hands ferociously twisted behind their backs, heads pushed down. My mother was made to kneel on broken glass. After the denunciation meetings, I helped my mother get home. I visited them in their camps without permission, journeys of days, four-day truck journeys. I had to find the trucks. I am saying all this because my family experienced the two extremes, and the two extremes coexisted in Chinese culture. It is a bizarre thing, but it is a fact. When I read Chinese books, I also feel this pettiness, constant family intrigue, stabbing each other’s backs. It never happened in my small family, but I think it happened in Dr. Xia’s family.
Mounk: What’s striking to me, again, both in your book and other historical books, novels, pieces of fiction and movies I’ve seen about Chinese culture, is that in a way it feels as though a lot of the customs, the historical customs before the arrival of communism, militated against that form of closeness and that it was a set of nearly heroic choices that created that closeness.
Dr. Xia, I think, is certainly one of the more positive male characters in your book. Not a flawless character, he’s a character who suffers from limitations himself, but he treats your grandmother and your mother with great kindness. He’s very courageous in standing up to the unwillingness of his family to accept your grandmother, but pays this terrible price for it.
I’ve been spending a little bit of time in China, and I’m trying to learn Chinese. It seems that when I talk to young people in China today, a lot of them are really not wanting to get married or have kids, or even be in a romantic partnership. I’ve seen some unofficial surveys where people say romance is the least important thing to them out of all of the different kinds of competing things that you might value. When I ask people in the country about that, one of the things that comes through is this kind of lack of social trust, which I find really striking.
I asked one person, “Why are you really not interested in any kind of romantic partnership or having a husband or wife?” What they said to me really struck me, which was, “It’s just having the responsibility for somebody else is too much, and you have to have enough money to have a good apartment, and you have to have all these things to get married.” I said, “Okay, sure. But surely one of the things that you might be able to get out of that is that if you lose your job, then your spouse is going to be there for you, and if they lose their job, then you’re going to be there for them. Even if I understand these material difficulties, historically marriage has also been a form of social insurance.”
They immediately said, “Well, but how could I trust that if I lose my job, they’d be there for me? How could I trust that if I were to be in a moment of need, anybody would actually still be there for me?” So I guess I was just reflecting, before I want to go to some of the more political aspects, about that element of family. Is there something caused by the historical traumas you described, caused by hundreds of years of a quite restrictive set of moral standards, caused by the different kinds of moral strictures of communism, that has eroded trust? Is that something that Chinese literature just happens to emphasize in a way that literatures of other countries don’t tend to emphasize? How are we to make sense of this?
Chang: I think there is something deeply unappetizing in the old Chinese culture. When we say culture, it has nothing to do with race or anything. It is just a tradition, a way of tradition that has evolved over the years. Now I am just speculating. I have not thought this out. It is quite interesting. China does not have a religion that urges people to be kind, to be universally kind. People depend, or have depended, on their own nature, either to be kind or to be unkind. There is not a general education to teach people to be kind universally, to think for other people and to be kind to other people. I think there is that. What I also think was more awful was the communist regime, particularly under Mao, used this deep-rooted unkindness and cruelty for political means.
To write Wild Swans, I interviewed my grandmother’s sister-in-law, my grandmother’s brother’s wife. She came from a very poor family, and when she came to be kind of on a date with my grandmother’s brother, she had to borrow a dress. She did not have decent clothes. When they were married, they lived with my grandma and Dr. Xia. My grandma was the mistress of the house, and her sister did a lot of the hard work, the housework. She was a bit unhappy about my grandma. Of course, in every family there are these problems. There were always problems of the family not being in harmony.
When the communists came, they classified her, anybody who did any work, as the employed, and my grandma and Dr. Xia as the employer. They encouraged her to think in terms of class struggle, in terms of the employed being exploited and suppressed by the employer. Her feelings, minor unhappiness, turned to major resentment. She then denounced them. She denounced my grandma to the authorities for having sympathy for Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and complaining about the communists. When the communists first came, they classified a lot of people as enemies, class enemies, and executed them. One of those executed in my mother’s home city was a Kuomintang nationalist officer. My grandma went to the execution ground with a big red silk and hired a funeral team to give him a decent funeral because his family had all fled. At that time my parents had gone from Manchuria to Sichuan in the south.
The grandaunt then denounced my grandma as having sympathy for the nationalists. The party organized the neighbors to what they call “struggle” against my grandma. My grandma had a communist daughter, and the neighbors were very nice, so she was easily off the hook. The relationship between the sisters-in-law was wrecked, and my grandmother died without reconciliation with the sister-in-law.
As it happened, the sister-in-law’s husband, my grandmother’s brother, was fairly under suspicion because he was also classified as a nationalist. I will not go into the details, but in the communist categories he was also classified as a nationalist. The couple was exiled to the northern wilderness to do harsh labor.
In 1989, when I went back to China to research Wild Swans, I interviewed my great aunt. To my surprise she said nothing against my grandma, revealed no resentment, and said very nice things about my grandma, about giving her husband a job, how the family lived there, and how kind my grandma was. I think that over the years the harsh life had put this hard housework in perspective. I think the class struggle, the communist doctrine, had heightened people’s resentment and encouraged people to feel resentful, and gave a political framework to this small resentment. I think that is the awful thing that Mao’s China did to people. They stirred up these animosities and used them to control people.
Mounk: You obviously see in moral panics around the world, particularly in totalitarian systems, that it always gives people an excuse for clothing personal ambition or personal resentment in ideological clothes. Whether that is people in Nazi Germany denouncing their neighbors or engaging in antisemitic pogroms in order to get the furniture of their neighbors, whether that is political intrigues in the Soviet Union getting people sent to the gulags because somebody feels disrespected by someone or is jealous of them and therefore denounces them, or whether it is in this context.
To tell you a little bit about my family’s history, my grandparents grew up in shtetls in central Europe under harsh and difficult conditions. All four of my grandparents became convinced communists when they were teenagers. I have thought about and struggled with the role that they ended up playing in life. I can completely see how they embraced that ideology under circumstances where a lot of people might have ended up doing the same thing, with great idealism and with a great conviction that they would help to build a better world. Yet they ended up going along with an ideology that did a lot of bad things in the world, long after one thinks they should have been able to recognize that. Long after the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, long after the Hitler-Ribbentrop Pact, long after a lot of bad things had happened.
I wonder how you are thinking about that in terms of the story of your parents, who under very different circumstances also came to a fervent belief in communism under circumstances that are very sympathetic. The rule of the Kuomintang, as you describe it and as is obvious from history books, is very cruel, very corrupt, and involved itself in the persecution of a lot of innocent people. It is very easy to read the description of how your mother slowly converted to a communist faith as a heroic story, a story of great moral courage. Yet they end up being relatively senior officials in a system that from the beginning involves a lot of oppression and a lot of violence. I wonder how you reflect on that generation of idealistic communists who helped to build a system that then does a lot of bad things to people.
Chang: Both my parents joined the communists when they were teenagers. My father was 17, working in a bookshop as a shop assistant. He had experienced hunger, injustice, and corruption, and he was easily attracted by the left-wing books the bookshop was selling, in which the communists promised a much better, glorious future.
He then went to Yan’an, where Mao’s headquarters was during the war against Japan. In Yan’an, Mao knew these young people, people like my father. I call them young volunteers. When they were there, they were invariably disappointed because Yan’an, their Mecca, as they called it at the time, was not what they had imagined. There was no equality, in particular, which had been one of the main attractions. Food, clothing, medical care, and childcare were all strictly graded. The party officials were treated completely differently from the younger people.
Mao started a terrorization campaign in 1943. This is not the place to describe that campaign, but basically that terrorization, which lasted two or three years, turned these idealistic young people, full of idealism, into rather wooden cogs in his machine. My mother joined the communist underground when she was 15. She had a boyfriend who was executed, or she believed to have died of torture. She also had a friend who died at the hands of the Kuomintang intelligence. Those were enough to turn a defiant 15-year-old to the other side. The communists also promised to ban concubinage, and because of my grandmother’s bitter experience as a concubine, this promise was particularly attractive to my mother.
Both my parents then realized that once you were in the party, you could not get out. To try to get out would be treated as trying to desert, and you would be punished as a deserter. I think this practice of no exit played a very important role in the power of the Communist Party. It is not like in the West, where I join the party, I do not like it, and I leave the next day. There, if you join, you face either staying in and toeing its line or very harsh punishment. I think that was a major factor. My parents’ faith in the party was shattered during the Great Famine between 1958 and 1961. Roughly 40 million people died of starvation, mostly peasants. That was when my parents’ devotion to the party definitively waned.
My father wrote a letter to Mao against some policies. This was the only way you could influence policy, to write to Mao. My father was a senior official in the province of Sichuan, then the most populous province in China. The governor persuaded my father to withdraw the letter by reminding him of the disastrous consequences this could bring to his family. My father was weighed down by guilt.
In the Cultural Revolution in 1966, four years later, he decided to speak up. For this he was arrested, tortured, driven insane, exiled to a camp, and died prematurely. I remember one day before the Cultural Revolution, when I was about 10, around 1961 or 1962, my father suddenly asked me why we made revolution. We made a revolution because people were starving and we wanted to give people a full stomach.
I was very shocked by the intensity and anguish in his voice and on his face. I now think he was not talking to me, he was talking to himself. He was reflecting on the total unacceptableness of a man-made famine by his own party. I think that was the moment he turned against the party. In the Cultural Revolution, he spoke up and he died.
My father suffered tremendously. My mother did not have my father’s anguish and sense of guilt because she was not so committed to the party. She had had reservations almost as soon as Mao’s army entered her city, Jinzhou in Manchuria, where she had been working for the underground. She realized the party was not like her group of friends in the underground.
Soon after she and my father were married, they had to leave Manchuria for Sichuan. The journey was a thousand miles long. My father was a senior officer, so he was entitled to a jeep or a horse. My mother was new to the revolution. She had to walk. She was 18 and pregnant. She suffered a miscarriage on the way.
During this walk she felt terrible, with vomiting and dizziness. She could not walk, but she was criticized for behaving like the precious princess of an exploiting class, crying after walking a few steps. Another dream of hers, that she would be in a warm family of comradeship, was shattered. At that moment she wanted to leave the party and go back to Manchuria to try to become a doctor. My father anxiously stopped her and warned her that she must not leave. If she left, she would have the most terrible fate waiting for her.
Mounk: To me, it is interesting, the parallel between the idealism and hope in the ideology and then the reality of it, and how to deal with that, which is certainly part of the story of my grandparents, who also became very disillusioned in various ways. There is the mix of external constraint and obvious danger if you speak out, and danger if you deviate from the path, but also the desperate desire that you read in reflections on former communists like The God That Failed or in fictional treatments like Darkness at Noon.
Part of being part of a movement is having this world-historical role, that you are a significant actor in history, that you are bringing about something good. To give up on that dream is psychologically an incredibly hard thing for people to do. You tasted a little bit of this as a teenager when you were in high school in Chengdu, in Sichuan, during the Cultural Revolution. Tell us a little bit about what was intoxicating about being a young person who was suddenly told that the fate of a country belonged in their hands, that they were bringing about something so important and purifying the country in such a big way, and how you yourself came to see that moment very critically.
Chang: I think my journey was very different from my parents. In their youth, they could think for themselves. When I was growing up, Mao was our God. We were taught—we were indoctrinated, brainwashed—to regard Mao as our God. When we were children, if we wanted to say what I say is absolutely true, we would say, “I swear to Chairman Mao.”
There was no question that you could challenge Mao. You could not contemplate him. He was like the air, the food, the water. He was part of these things you just have to accept. When I was 14, in my second year in secondary school, Mao started the Cultural Revolution and ordered the young people to join the Red Guards, his task force in the Cultural Revolution.
It went without saying that we should join. My classmates, the schoolchildren, were all desperate to join the Red Guards. In fact, in the end, I dare say every one of my generation at the time in China was some sort of Red Guard because it became a very loose organization. The revolution had no intoxication for me. I feared and hated what I saw because my school became a terrifying place.
I saw our teachers being subjected to denunciation meetings. The thing I just described later was an everyday sight in China then. At one denunciation meeting in the summer of 1966, my English teacher was put on a narrow bench along with other eminent teachers. He was ordered to bend down, he could not stand still, he fell from the bench, cut his head, and there was blood. It was summer, but I felt cold to my bones. I wanted to escape from all that, but I could not leave.
I was taken by some boys in my class to witness them beating up our philosophy teacher. They did not like her because she had been dismissive towards them, and they wanted me to be there to see because they said she had often praised me. I saw the most horrible sight of her being kicked around, made to beg forgiveness, to kneel and kowtow and beg forgiveness from the children.
One night I caught sight of a girl jumping from an upstairs window. The children were divided into Blacks and Reds. The Blacks were deemed undesirable because they came from undesirable families, Kuomintang officers, rightists, people who had spoken up and criticized the regime. The Reds were supposed to be from workers, peasants, revolutionary cadres, communist officials. The Reds were licensed to torment the Blacks. This girl was deemed to be a Black.
Children from her class were ruthlessly tormenting her, insulting her, cutting her hair into a grotesque shape. She could not endure it anymore and threw herself from the window. I was far away, and through the branches of trees I caught a glimpse of this figure out of the window. I had horrible nightmares. I found an excuse and went home.
Home was not a safe place because my father at that time spoke up and was deemed an enemy, a counter-revolutionary. I hated all that. On my 16th birthday, I wrote my first poem, but the Red Guards came to raid our flat, and I had to rush to the toilet to tear up my poem and flush it down the loo. That night, on my 16th birthday, I thought to myself, if this is paradise, if socialist China is paradise, what then is hell?
I was turned against the society. Before that, I had joined the Red Guards because everybody who had not been admitted was admitted on National Day, October 1, 1966. I was in the Red Guards for two weeks and was appalled by what I saw. Even though I was appalled and started questioning the society I lived in, I never questioned Mao until many years later.
The power of brainwashing was so strong. I blamed Madame Mao, I blamed the Gang of Four, but you could not bring yourself to contemplate Mao. The moment came in 1974, eight years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. I knew a friend who had a copy of Newsweek. There was an article about Mao. In the article there was a small picture of Mao and a small picture of Madame Mao, and the caption said, “Madame Mao is Mao’s eyes, ears, and mouth.”
Mao’s name was spelled out for me. I suddenly realized that Mao was responsible. It was not Madame Mao or anyone else, it was Mao. I am a fairly intelligent person, and it took me eight years to realize Mao’s responsibility. It was thanks to his name being spelled out for me.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jung discuss to what extent the Cultural Revolution was unique, what we can learn from Chinese history, and predictions for the future of the country. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Yascha Mounk to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
