“I love democracy and reject dictatorship.”
We met British-Chinese Jung Chang, author of the bestseller Wild Swans, for a conversation on reading, writing and fundamental freedoms that never should be taken for granted.
“I wrote my first poem when I was 16, on my 16th. birthday, in 1968. I was in our flat polishing the poem when I heard the door banging. The Red Guards had come to raid our flat. If they saw my poem, my family and I would get into trouble. And so, I had to quickly rush to the bathroom to tear up my poem to flush it down the toilet. And that was an important moment for me. I realised how much I hated the society I was living in.”
”Reading literally kept you sane in the sense that it kept your mind working. And this writer, J.G. Ballard, when he reviewed my first book, Wild Swans, said it was an unforgettable portrait of the brain death of a nation. I mean, in the Cultural Revolution, there was a kind of brain death, and, without books, people were much more easily brutalised. And that was what Mao wanted. He didn’t want people who were human beings and who were thinking. He just wanted them to mindlessly carry out his brutal orders.”
The current Chinese regime, with its authoritarian character, brutality on any opposition, digital surveillance of people and censorship of books, more and more looks like a neo-Maoist regime. There should be no illusions, says Chang, and the democracies of the West should do much more to protect themselves as open societies:
”Well, I think that in the West, people take for granted their freedoms, including freedom of speech, of reading, and of writing. And so, when suddenly there are books that you can’t write, books that are deemed too sensitive, expressions, words that are deemed offensive, and there is this tendency to censor expressions – then yes, of course, I react very anxiously.”
Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), she worked as a peasant, a “barefoot” doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York – the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university.
Jung Chang is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, except in China, where it is banned, as are all of her other books. She wrote a ground-breaking trilogy of the history and personalities of modern China: Mao: The Unknown Story (2005, with Jon Halliday), which was described by Time magazine as “an atom bomb of a book”; Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013), and Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China (2019). In the autumn of 2025, the sequel to her bestseller, Wild Swans, Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China (2025), was published.
Chang’s books have been translated into more than 40 languages. She has won many awards, including the UK Writers’ Guild Best Non-Fiction and Book of the Year UK. She has received honorary doctorates from several universities in the UK and USA (Buckingham, York, Warwick, Dundee, the Open University, University of West London, and Bowdoin College). She is an Honorary Fellow of SOAS University of London. She has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to literature and to history.
Jung Chang was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in November 2025 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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