User:Leafeon1/Jung Chang

Introduction

Jung Chang CBE (traditional Chinese: 張戎; simplified Chinese: 张戎; pinyin: Zhāng Róng; Wade–Giles: Chang Jung, Mandarin pronunciation: [tʂɑ́ŋ ɻʊ̌ŋ]; born 25 March 1952) is a Chinese-born British author. She is best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 20 million copies and won a CBE award. Despite the book's great success worldwide, it was banned in the People's Republic of China. Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005.

Life in China

Early Life

Jung Chang was born on March 25, 1952, in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China. There, she grew up in the turbulence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). As a young child, Chang and her four siblings lived a rather privileged life since both of her parents were high-ranking communist officials. Her father's formal ranking was as a "level 10 official", meaning that he was one of 20,000 or so most important cadres, or ganbu, in the country.

Chang was originally named Er-hong (Chinese: 二鴻; lit. 'Second Swan'), which sounds like the Chinese word for "faded red". As communists were "deep red", she asked her father to rename her when she was 12 years old, specifying she wanted "a name with a military ring to it." He suggested "Jung", which means "martial affairs."

Cultural Revolution

In 1966, when Chang was only fourteen years old, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Around this time, Chang's father began to speak out against Mao which ultimately led to his and the rest of Chang's family to persecution. Her father was arrested, tortured, and exiled to a camp where he later passed. Chang's mother, on the other hand, was pressured to denounce her husband, but she refused. As punishment, her mother was forced to over a hundred ghastly denunciation meetings which included her mother kneeling on broken glass, receiving physical beatings, and other forms of public torture. In the end, Chang's mother survived all the ghastly denunciation meetings and is still alive.

As for the rest of Chang's family, they were all scattered across China. Chang, herself, was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas where she worked a different life from the one she originally grew up with. In the Himalayas, Chang was forced to learn how to cook for herself, rather than having meals prepared for her by servants before the Cultural Revolution. Around this time, The Great Leap Forward (an effort to make steel in villages), made Chang's experience with cooking rather difficult as this process burned up all the firewood surrounding the Himalayas. As a result, every day she was subjected to long periods of finding twigs and leaves to maintain a working fire for cooking.

Additionally, Chang was forced to find work in the Himalayas to survive. She found work in several different occupations, including a peasant in the commune, a barefoot doctor, and an electrician. Despite finding work as a barefoot doctor and electrician, she had no prior training or education. Due to the Cultural Revolution and Mao's dictatorship, schools were closed and books were burned, cutting off any source of education available to Chang.

Education in China

Chang enjoyed writing from a young age, but growing up in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s under Mao's rule restricted her ability to learn and write. Around that time, many writers in China were condemned to punishment, such as execution, by Mao and his political persecutions. When she was only 16 years old, Chang wrote her first poem in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. Not long after her poem was written, the Red Guards raided her flat and she was forced to tear up her poem before she could get caught. During Mao's rule, many universities were shut down, leading Chang, and most of her generation, away from the political maelstroms of the academy. Instead, she spent several years as a peasant, a barefoot doctor (a part-time peasant doctor), a steelworker, and an electrician despite receiving no formal training because of Mao's policy. Around this time, there was no formal instruction as a prerequisite for such work.

The universities were eventually re-opened and she gained a place at Sichuan University to study English, later becoming an assistant lecturer there. After Mao died in 1976, she passed an exam that allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was politically rehabilitated.

Life in Britain

Education in Britain

Following the end of Mao's rule, Chang left China in 1978 to study in Britain on a government scholarship. She later moved to Yorkshire, studying linguistics at the University of York with a scholarship from the university itself, living in Derwent College, York. Even after moving to Britain for school, she still wasn't completely free. The Communist Party had a set of strict guidelines that Chang and other students were required to follow while studying abroad. She was also required to wear 'Mao suits' as a part of her everyday uniform. After graduating from York in 1982, she received her PhD in linguistics, becoming the first person from the People's Republic of China to be awarded a PhD from a British university. In 1986, she and Jon Halliday published Mme Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ching-ling), a biography of Sun Yat-Sen's widow.

Chang has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Buckingham, the University of York, the University of Warwick, the University of Dundee, the Open University, the University of West London, and Bowdoin College (USA). She lectured for some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before leaving in the 1990s to concentrate on her writing.

It took Chang around 10 years after moving to Britain to continue pursuing her passion for writing. After moving to Britain, the new environment was so different from China that her urge to write vanished and she could only focus on absorbing her new life. For instance, during her life in China, Mao made her and other students pick out flowers and grass from the ground as it was considered a bourgeois habit. Compared to China's wasteland scenery due to the lack of nature, Britain had fields full of flowers and Chang felt immense joy. In 2003, Jung Chang wrote a new foreword to Wild Swans, describing her early life in Britain and explaining why she wrote the book. She found Britain exciting and loved the country, especially its diverse range of culture, literature, and arts. She found even colorful window boxes worth writing home about – Hyde Park and the Kew Gardens were inspiring. Chang took every opportunity to watch Shakespeare's plays in both London and York. In an interview with HarperCollins, Chang stated: "I feel perhaps my heart is still in China". It was not until she reunited with her mother that her mother shared her and Chang's grandmother's life story. Her mother went on to stay with Chang for six months. During this time, Chang was able to tape-record her mother's stories. After her mom left, she went on to pursue writing, and shortly after wrote " Madame Sun Yat-Sen" and "Wild Swans".

Celebrity

Chang became a popular figure for talks about Communist China; and she has traveled across Britain, Europe, America, and many other places in the world. She returned to the University of York on 14 June 2005, to address the university's debating union and spoke to an audience of over 300, most of whom were students.[9] The BBC invited her onto the panel of Question Time for a first-ever broadcast from Shanghai on 10 March 2005,[10] but she was unable to attend when she broke her leg a few days beforehand. Chang is also very open and often speaks out in public speaking or interviews on podcasts. Some podcasts she has been in are with Dwarkesh Podcast- "Living through Cultural Revolution and the Crimes of Mao", and "My Life in Seven Charms with Annoushka Ducas".

Current Status

Chang lives in west London with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, who specializes in the history of Asia. She is able to visit mainland China to see her mother, with permission from the Chinese authorities, despite the fact that all her books are banned. When Chang visits her mother, who still resides in Sichuan Province, China, she is treated as a "virtual prisoner" and is required to go straight to her mother once she arrives. She is also only allowed 15 days out of a year to visit. Chang usually visits in May when her mother's birthday is.

Publications

Wild Swans

The international best-seller is a biography of three generations of Chinese women in 20th century China- Chang's grandmother, mother, and herself. This work was a dedication to Chang's father and grandmother who passed during the Cultural Revolution. Additionally, she credits her mother for inspiring and supporting her while writing this book. Chang uses this book to paint a vivid portrait of the political and military turmoil of China in this period, from the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord, to her mother's experience of Japanese-occupied Jinzhou during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and her own experience of the effects of Mao's policies of the 1950s and 1960s.

Wild Swans was translated into 38 languages and sold 20 million copies worldwide, receiving praise from authors such as J. G. Ballard. Wild Swans won the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 CBE award. It is banned in mainland China, though many pirated versions circulated, as do translations in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

There is a television project on "Wild Swans" but is unlikely to have a chance to do well, according to Jung Chang herself. There have been many attempts to televise this book but international filmmakers are worried about repercussions from Chinese partners.

Mao: The Unknown Story

Chang's 2005 work, a biography of Mao, was co-authored with her husband Jon Halliday, and portrays Mao in an extremely negative light. The couple traveled all over the world to research the book, which took 12 years to write.[12] They interviewed hundreds of people who had known Mao, including George H. W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama.[12] Kissinger called it "grotesque in that it depicts Mao as a man without any qualities."[13] Later, he described it in his book On China as "one-sided but often thought-provoking."[14] Chang had high hopes for the book but understood and expected the reaction it received, both good and bad.

Mao: The Unknown Story became a best-seller, with UK sales alone reaching 60,000 in six months. Academics and commentators wrote reviews ranging from praise to criticism. Professor Richard Baum said that it had to be "taken very seriously as the most thoroughly researched and richly documented piece of synthetic scholarship" on Mao. Other professors didn't have great things to say about the book. For example, Thomas Bernstein, a professor at Columbia University called it a '... a major disaster for the contemporary China field...' because it was destroying Mao's reputation. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that while few commentators disputed it, "some of the world's most eminent scholars of modern Chinese history" had referred to the book as "a gross distortion of the records." Since the publication of this book in 2005, Chang lost her freedom to travel to China. She is only permitted 15 days out of a year to visit China.