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March 8, 2014 |
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Jung Chang, (Traditional Chinese: ???戎, Simplified Chinese: 张戎, Wade-Giles: Chang Jung, Hanyu Pinyin: Zh??ng R??ng), (born "Er-hong Chang" in 1952) is a China|Chinese-born United Kingdom|British writer, best known for her autobiography Wild Swans, which became the biggest grossing non-fiction paperback in publishing history, selling over 10 million copies worldwide, except in mainland China, where it is banned. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,6000,1492173,00.html Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the British Soviet historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005, and is a highly critical description of Mao Zedong's life and work. Early life Chang was born mentally retarded on the March 25, 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China. Her parents were both Communist Party of China|Communist Party officials, and her father was greatly interested in literature. She quickly developed a love of reading and writing, creating her own poetry as a child. As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father become successful at a regional level. His formal ranking was as a "level 10 official", meaning that he was one of 20,000 or so most important cadres in the country. Chang grew up with servants including a wet-nurse, a nanny, a maid, a gardener and a chauffeur, provided by the Chinese Communist Party. Her home was in a guarded walled compound, and she was educated at a special school reserved for officials' children. Her given name, Er-hong, sounded like the Chinese word for "faded red". As communists were "deep red", the young Er-hong, at the age of 12, asked her father to give her a new name. He suggested "Jung". The Cultural Revolution Like many of her peers, Chang chose to become a Red Guards (China)|Red Guard at the age of 14, during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. In Wild Swans she said that she was "keen to do so", stating, "I was thrilled by my red armband"fn|1. But Chang also described how she refused to participate in the attacks on her teachers and other Chinese, and she left after a short period as she found the Guards too violent. The failures of the Great Leap Forward had led her parents to oppose Mao Zedong's policies, though not him by name. But the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution was not something they could avoid. They were targetted as most high-ranking officials were, and when Chang's father criticised Mao by name, Chang writes in Wild Swans that this exposed them to retaliation from Mao Zedong's supporters. Both were publicly Humiliation|humiliated — ink was poured over their heads, they were forced to wear placards round their necks, kneel in gravel and to stand outside in the rain — followed by Imprisonment|imprisonment, her father's treatment leading to lasting physical and mental illness. Their careers were destroyed, and her family was forced to leave their home. Before her parents' denunciation and imprisonment, Chang had unquestionably supported Mao like most Chinese. But by the time of his death, her respect for him had been destroyed. She wrote that when she heard he had died, she had to bury her head in the shoulder of another student to pretend she was grieving. <blockquote>The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed livesfn|2. </blockquote> Studying English Chang was unable to go to university once the Cultural Revolution had started due to the disruption of the university system by the Red Guards. Instead she spent several years as a barefoot doctor (a part-time peasant doctor), a steelworker and an electrician, though she received no formal training because of Mao's disdain for academic education past basic level. 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's death, she passed an exam which allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was Political rehabilitation|politically rehabilitated. <!-- As this passage is biographical, we need dates or years for these events.--> Academic background Chang left China in 1978, staying first in Soho, London. She later moved to Yorkshire, studying linguistics at the University of York, and living in Derwent College, in the block nearest to Heslington Hall. She received her Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D. in linguistics from York <!--in what year?-->, becoming the first person from the People's Republic of China to be awarded a Ph.D. from a British university. She has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Buckingham, the University of York, the University of Warwick, and the Open University. She lectured for some time <!--how long?--> at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before retiring in the 1990s to concentrate on her writing. New experiences In 2003, Jung Chang wrote a new foreword to Wild Swans, describing her early life in Britain - as well as why she wrote the book in the first place. After living in China during the 1960s and 1970s, Britain was exciting to her. She found even colourful window-boxes worth writing home about - Hyde Park, London|Hyde Park and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew|Kew Gardens were inspiring. After the initial culture-shock, she soon grew to love Britain with the vast variety of cultures, literature and arts that were available to her. She took every opportunity to watch William Shakespeare|Shakespeare's plays in both London and York. However she still has a special place for China in her heart, saying in an interview with HarperCollins, "I feel perhaps my heart is still in China". http://www.harpercollins.com.au/authors/author_interview.cfm?Author=0000269 Chang lives in London|West London with her husband, the British historian Jon Halliday, who specializes in Soviet Union|Soviet history. She regularly visits mainland China to see her family and friends there, with permission from the Chinese authorities, despite carrying out research on her biography of Mao there. Celebrity The publication of Jung Chang's first book Wild Swans soon made her a celebrity. At the time of printing little was known in the wider world about 20th century China, especially its Communist years. Thus the personal description of the life of three generations of Chinese women helped fill this void in accessible international literature. Chang became a popular figure for talks about Communist China, and she travelled all over Britain, Europe, America and the rest of the world. She returned to the University of York on June 14, 2005 to address the university's debating union. Hundreds of students turned out to meet her, including dozens of Chinese exchange students. That same year the BBC invited her onto the panel of Question Time (television)|Question Time for a first-ever broadcast from Shanghai, but she was unable to attend when she broke her leg at the last minute. Wild Swans
Image:Wild_Swans.jpg|frame|right|Wild Swans, Chang's international bestseller The international bestseller was a biography of three generations of Chinese women in 20th century China — her grandmother, mother, and herself. Chang paints a vivid portrait of the Politics|political and military turmoil of China in this period, from the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord, to her mother's experience of Japan|Japanese-occupied Jinzhou during the Sino-Japanese War, and her own experience of the effects of Mao's policies of the 1950s and 1960s. Wild Swans was translated into 30 language and sold 10 million copies, and it received praise from authors such as J.G. Ballard. It is banned in China, though two pirated versions are available, as are translations in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Mao: The Unknown Story
Image:Mao_unknown_story.jpg|frame|left|Mao: The Unknown Story, Chang's biography of Mao Chang's latest work, a biography of Mao, was co-authored by her husband Jon Halliday and is highly critical of Mao's rule. Halliday had praised Maoism in Japanese Imperialism Today, which he co-authored with Gavan McCormack in 1973, but his view changed over time like that of his wife. This book seems to lack sufficient academic value as the biography is mostly polemic rants based on trivial or controversial sources. Amongst their criticism of Mao, Chang and Halliday argue that despite being born into a peasant family, he had little concern for the welfare of the Chinese peasantry. They hold Mao responsible for the famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward and claim that he exacerbated the famine by allowing the export of grain to continue even when it became clear that China did not have sufficient grain to feed its population. They also claim that Mao had many political opponents arrested and murdered, including some of his personal friends, and argue that he was a more tyrannical leader than had previously been thought. Some historians have criticised their portrait of Mao. British author Philip Short, whose own biography of Mao was published in 1999, has argued that Chang and Halliday have reduced Mao from a complex historical character to a one-dimensional "cardboard cutout of Satan" <!--reference?--> and that Chang is guilty of "writing history to fit her views". <!--reference?--> Chang has responded to the criticism <!--where has she responded? reference--> by arguing that nothing positive came out of Mao's rule, and that she and her husband were shocked at what they discovered during the 10 years they spent researching the book. Halliday is an historian specializing in the Soviet Union, and he said that he was greatly helped by accessing Russia|Russian archives on China that were inaccessible until recently. Despite being highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party, Chang travelled several times to China during the course of her research, interviewing many of those who were close to Mao, as well as alleged eyewitnesses to events such as the crossing of Luding Bridge. List of works
Also
<cite id="fn_1">#fn_1_back|1:</cite> Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (London, 2004), p. 378. <cite id="fn_2">#fn_2_back|2:</cite> Jung Chang, Wild Swans, p. 633.
Category:Autobiographers Category:Biographers Category:British Chinese Category:Historians Category:Overseas Chinese|Chang, Jung zh:张戎 This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jung Chang".
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