Wild Swans

Wild Swans recounts the lives of three generations of Jung Chang’s family. Her grandmother was given as a concubine to a warlord during the instability of republican China; her mother became a committed Communist and party official; and Chang herself grew up inside the revolutionary state. Their experiences carry the narrative through Japanese invasion, civil war, Communist victory, collectivisation, famine and the Cultural Revolution.

Chang combines family testimony with autobiography to show how political campaigns entered marriage, education, work and private loyalties. Her parents’ persecution, her early enthusiasm as a Red Guard and her later disillusionment give the national history an intimate scale. The book is both a multigenerational memoir and a social history of twentieth-century China, particularly valuable for its account of how ideology and state power reshaped ordinary family life across several radically different regimes.