No writer has done more than Jung Chang to bring the horrors of Maoist China to the attention of western readers. In her monumental memoir Wild Swans (1991), she recounted the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution through the stories of her grandmother, her mother and herself. Its influence was enormous: Wild Swans sold more than 15 million copies, making it one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time. In Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, she blew apart decades of Chinese Communist party propaganda to reevaluate Mao as one of history’s greatest monsters, as bad, if not worse, than Hitler or Stalin.
Unsurprisingly, none of her books is sold in China (although translations circulate on the black market) and her name is blocked on the Chinese internet. She has also been intimidated and hounded by the regime. For this, Chang is often described in western media as ‘fearless’. But this isn’t strictly accurate. She does worry about how the regime might react to what she writes – which is what makes her writing all the more courageous.
‘If you don’t have optimism – if you are dominated by pessimism – you don’t fight’
‘This sort of fear has always been there,’ she says, when we meet at a restaurant in Notting Hill. ‘It started from day one in 1988 when I planned Wild Swans. I just had to make a decision. You’re either right or you’re not. I had to put any concern to the back of my mind and not allow it to interfere with my writing.’
She says she followed the advice of her mother, of whom she speaks with deep reverence: ‘My mother told me just to write exactly what I want to write, otherwise I can’t write a good book. I mustn’t fear how it is received or about her safety. She always says the times have changed, that nothing could be worse than the Cultural Revolution. She says, “We’ve lived through all that and can live through anything.” So she’s very brave. Of course the danger is always there, but you have to ignore it.’
Chang’s mother is a central part of the sequel memoir, Fly, Wild Swans. In it, Chang, 73, picks up the story from when she arrived in Britain in 1978 as one of the first students to leave China after Mao’s death and brings it up to the present day.
Throughout our interview, Chang speaks with poise, care and impeccable politeness – she refers to Xi Jinping, a man she warns is trying to build a neo-Maoist state and dominate the world, as ‘Mr Xi’. The Chinese President’s shadow looms large over the book. It is thanks to him that she will never again be able to see her mother, who is 94 and on her death bed. ‘He gave this order – one of his first, if not the first – immediately after he became the permanent supreme leader of China [in 2018],’ she says. ‘He made it a crime to insult revolutionary heroes… I realised that, because of my biography of Mao, in which I had documented his misrule, I run great risk if I’m in China.’
This was not an empty threat. Chang cites the case of Gao Zhen, an artist who last year was detained by Chinese authorities when he visited his family in Sanhe, east of Beijing, because of irreverent sculptures of Mao he’d made as far back as the 1980s. ‘He didn’t say anything against the regime. He lived in America [since 2022] and he stayed away from all political things. And yet he was arrested.’
The regime’s attempts at intimidation are not always confined to China’s borders. Once, in the middle of the night, intruders silently scaled the balcony of Chang’s London home and methodically destroyed all her plants and flowers with a serrated knife. ‘I was really quite spooked,’ she says. ‘I’ve never told my mother that story because I think even she would have been worried. The balcony was suspended in the middle of the air, and there was no way you can get on to it. The police said they couldn’t. Special Branch couldn’t. It was professional.’
These days, however, she doesn’t worry about being trailed in London. ‘Perhaps because [the CCP] now have more enemies,’ she says with a smile, but more significantly because the old-fashioned surveillance techniques are dying out. ‘The advancement of technology makes surveillance by people less important. They may not specifically target someone. Instead, they collect everything, then if they need something, they can pull the data out. Everyone has to assume they are being constantly monitored. ’
It would be easy to despair at such pronouncements, but one constant in Chang’s work is a kind of radical optimism. In the epilogue to Wild Swans Chang presents a Francis Fukuyama-ish belief in the inescapable victory of liberal democracy. But the rise of Xi, as well as other 21st-century strongmen, has tested that faith.
‘For many years I believed, like many westerners, prosperity would make China inevitably go for democracy,’ she says. ‘Mr Xicoming to power told me that the party has other plans. He came to power to make sure that China would absolutely not go for western democracy, but instead become more like a Maoist China with capitalist characteristics. So obviously I feel alarmed. When I first realised this, a fear – a fear that hadn’t surfaced for 40 years – came back… [Xi] has the ambition to dominate the world and is quite confident he can win. I knew, having studied Mao, Mao had that ambition and that it lay at the root of the Great Leap, because he wanted to build China into a military superpower… He, Mao, failed because China was poor.’ Since modern China is not poor, does Xi have a better chance of succeeding? ‘Certainly. Money can do a lot of things.’
Yet Chang still has hope. For her, it is a necessity. ‘If you don’t have optimism – if you are dominated by pessimism – then you don’t fight,’ she says. ‘Because if you do, what’s the point? Optimism is almost in order for you to fight to do something.’
She adds: ‘The other thing is: my optimism is not based on blind denial. There are grounds for it. In the case of Mr Xi, his attempt at turning China backwards has achieved only relative success. China [today] is not at all like Mao’s China. For one thing, he is unable to close the door of China, which he would have liked to if possible. Like Mao, he has multi-conflicting goals, which means that he can’t achieve what he really wants to achieve. Finally, in theworld in 2018 nobody was talking about China in this way. It still seemed to be this benign country, good for business. Today, people have realised the tyrannical nature of Xi’s ambition and what it means to us.’
A pessimist could argue that many British politicians are still dangerously naive when dealing with China. In the last three months alone, Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s national security adviser, was accused of torpedoing the Westminster spying trial to appease Beijing; MI5 warned all MPs about China’s attempts to gain influence in British politics; and the government is due to approve a new Chinese mega-embassy on the site of the old Royal Mint. This was despite concerns that the embassy could become a spy hub for the CCP. Why are western leaders still reluctant to fully acknowledge the threat that Xi’s China poses?
‘I think Beijing is trying very hard not to be designated an enemy, so they are still able to make a lot of money,’ Chang says. ‘But also for the West, it’s a big step if you designate an enemy. I assume there are a lot of things you have to change in the law. I don’t know, I’m not a politician.’ Of one thing, however, she is sure: CCP infiltration goes ‘far beyond’ the cases that have reached the public.
Western naivety is one factor. Another is the new generation of regime apologists, who, Chang writes, have given Xi a ‘helping hand’ in ‘dragging China back on to the road towards a Maoist hell’. Chang says that no one familiar with CCP history should accept at face value the language of modern propagandists, whose almost comically anodyne terms – ‘harmony’, ‘dialogue’, or ‘shared future’ – gloss over Xi’s autocraticgoals. ‘[Xi’s] language is actually much more similar than his predecessors’ to Maoist language. To me, it’s very familiar. Of course, to a westerner, if you don’t know the tradition of the language, you might think it’s rather benign… For example, the “study course” they’re putting the Uighurs through – my parents were put in “study courses” in the Cultural Revolution, which were quasi-prisons.’ She cites an incident in 2018, when Qeyser Qeyum, a Uighur newspaper editor, killed himself by jumping out of the eighth floor of his office building rather than let the authorities put him in one of Xinjiang’s political indoctrination camps.
‘I believed prosperity would make China inevitably go for democracy. The CCP has other plans’
Perhaps part of the reason Chang feels that she has some understanding of Xi is because they are almost exact contemporaries. She was born in 1952, he in 1953. Both had fathers who were senior CCP officials (although Xi’s, unlike Chang’s, never lost his faith in communism). Chang and Xi would have had the same education, undergone the same brainwashing and read the same books on the black market. They would have witnessed many of the same horrors of the Cultural Revolution, with their families suffering similar abuses. After criticising Mao, Chang’s father was tortured and beaten and her mother was made to kneel on broken glass. Xi’s half-sister, driven mad by the Red Guards’ persecution, committed suicide, and Xi himself was denounced at a mass rally as a ‘reactionary’ when he was just 13. Of her and Xi’s background, Chang says, ‘we’re exactly the same’.
And yet there are many people in modern China who, like Xi, have genuine admiration for Mao, even though they suffered under him. ‘Quite a lot of children of high communist officials think that way,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen too many people like that. Deng Xiaoping himself, for example – his son was forced to jump from a top-floor window and paralysed from the chest down. Such horrendous suffering. How could they still believe in communism? And in Mao? But they do. Of course, one thing is practical. The survival of communism is personally beneficial to them. They benefit financially and in terms of social status, it would all disappear if communism falls. But it’s more than that. It’s not just for money. It’s the conviction. Xi’s father, for Christ’s sake, was nearly buried alive when he was 22 [during a communist purge in 1935] – and he continued in the party! This twisted way of thinking perpetuates the communist regime.’
There is a clear, burning morality in all Chang’s writing. She describes Mao as ‘evil’ – an unfashionable word in modern academia. Some reviewers and ever-vocal ‘China experts’ dismissed her Mao biography as ‘one-sided’ or ‘biased’. (For context: one such negative review described Mao as ‘far from perfect’.)
Chang has described Xi as Mao’s ‘true successor’ – so would she also describe him as evil? ‘I haven’t studied him, so I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but I think the chances are nobody can be as evil as Mao. Truly evil people are quite few. I don’t think Xi would be totally indifferent to the death of his population, unlike Mao.’
She is also encouraged by signs that, even now, there are restrictions to Xi’s power. ‘The current regime tinkered with getting rid of paper cash and just using electronic payments, which, of course, is the ultimate totalitarian tool. At any point you can take away everything somebody has. So they have the tool, but it wasn’t pushed through because it hurt them as well as the population. It would hurt their families and the money they have. [Even] an ultimate dictator needs a power-base. He has to, in some way, make sure his base doesn’t lose everything. So there’s always limits. There’s always a backlash.’
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