When ideology and ego prove to be thicker than blood
BACK in 1991, Jung Chang published Wild Swans, a family memoir delineating a century of Chinese history told through the lives of three women: Chang’s grandmother, who became a concubine to a Chinese warlord in the 1920s; Chang’s mother, a prominent communist organiser who was married to a high-ranking member of the Communist Party of China (CPP); and the author’s own colourful adventures in the province of Sichuan.
Written in exile from London, it sold more than 10 million copies, becoming the highest-selling non-fiction paperback in publishing history.
Wild Swans is still banned in China, as is Chang’s follow-up book, Mao: The Unknown Story, which she co-authored with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday.
A visceral hatred for the Chairman clearly emerged from the pages of what has since become the definitive Mao biography. The unforgiving tone isn’t surprising, given how much trauma the brutal communist dictator inflicted on Chang’s family and the wider community.
Chengdu, the author’s native city, was picked by Mao as a launching pad for the Great Leap Forward: the disastrous push for rapid industrial development that caused a mass famine across China between 1959 and 1961 where 36 million perished. Then in 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution: a decade-long orgy of ideological violence where an estimated 1.5 million were murdered.
Of the suspected enemies kept alive, many were imprisoned — including Chang’s parents; her father suffered a subsequent mental breakdown.
Conversely, Chang’s pragmatic mother emerged from the traumatic ordeal by learning how to master the subtle rules that operate within a dictatorial regime. It enabled her daughter to get a scholarship, which paved the way for a ticket out of China to the West.
This is a common theme that emerges from Chang’s writing: headstrong, independent-minded women finding their way into paths of power and personal freedom in what is otherwise a predominantly male-dominated society — where murderous violence, fear and totalitarian conformity condemns the majority of the population to a life of slavish servitude.
Chang’s third book, Empress Dowager Cixi, documented the extraordinary life of a semi-literate concubine who unofficially ruled China’s Qing dynasty from 1861 to 1908.
In Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, Chang has returned to a narrative formula almost identical to Wild Swans: dissecting China’s turbulent path towards modernity through the lives of three women.
This time around it’s the Soong sisters. In China it is often remarked of the three siblings that one loved money, one loved power, and one loved her native land.
The sisters were born into a privileged Christian family in the last years of the 19th Century. Their western education gave them a linguistic and cultural advantage that was rare in China at the time.
To personalise what is otherwise a dense and complex family tree, Chang gives the trio affectionate nicknames.
The eldest sibling, Ei-ling, ‘Big Sister’, made a fortune as a financial speculator, becoming China’s richest woman.
Ching-ling, ‘Red Sister’, was the family’s only committed communist and married Dr Sun Yat-Sen, the revolutionary founder of the Republic of China. When Mao took power in 1949 she became his vice-chairman.
The baby of the family May-ling, ‘Little Sister’, became first lady of precommunist nationalist China and married Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, who ruled China until the communists drove his political regime to Taiwan in 1949.
Even in the most conventional of families clan loyalties can be severely tested when a difference of opinion arises.
Throw money and politics into the equation, and ego and ideology eventually proves to be thicker than blood. The Soongs’ falling-out began in 1931, when Kai-shek
‘Chang returns to a formula almost identical to Wild Swans’
executed a potential political rival, Deng Yan-da.
At the time Red Sister had been recently widowed and was spending significant time in Europe with Yan-da, who was slowly winning her heart.
Following his coldblooded murder, she approached the Secret Comintern representation in Shanghai to join the Communist Party. The Generalissimo subsequently had his intelligence agents send his sister-in-law bullets in the post.
The family rift was momentarily put aside after Japan occupied China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (193745) — when nationalists and communists forgot ideological differences to unite against a common enemy. The three sisters took part in a PR exercise of national unity.
But this family and national display of unity was short-lived. When Mao grabbed power from the nationalists in 1949 Red Sister took on her communist comrades as her adopted family — ignoring emotional letters from her sisters, who wrote from exile.
While the three Soong sisters were proud daughters of Shanghai, the political circumstances of China turning communist ensured none of them died there.
Red Sister spent her final years in Beijing, where she remained loyal to the party until the end.
Little Sister and Big Sister spent their final years in New York, mostly in luxurious settings — accusations of corruption were never too far away.
Chang is clearly at home in a narrative milieu where huge sweeps of history are simplified into personalised human interest stories. Such an approach certainly makes the reader’s life easier. But it can also feel a little too simplified at times.
Important historical events are merely skimmed over, and the historical analysis is applied with such a light-hearted touch it feels like Chang is afraid of offending the powerful figures she is writing about.
Readers looking for the meticulous, hard-nosed scholarship and hardnecked opinionated history found in Chang’s Mao biography won’t find it here.
But these shortfalls aside, the book is a riveting and action-packed story where it’s hard not to be enthralled by the murky underworld of the Soongs — its numerous twists and turns are saturated with money, travel, history, corruption, treachery, risk, honour, glory, fear, deception, power, and politics.
And China’s most powerful family of the 20th century makes the likes of the Kennedys and the Borgias seem like small fish by comparison.