Jung Chang on A Personal History of China

China does not have a religion, it did not have a religion that urges people to be kind, to be universally kind. So people depend or have depended on their own nature either to be kind or to be unkind. I mean there is uh not a general education um to teach people to be kind universally, to think for the other people and to be kind to the to other people. Um I think there is that. I mean what I think um was was more awful with the communist regime, particularly

Angler Mao used this deep-rooted unkindness and cruelty for political means. And now the good fight with Yasha Mong. My guest today is Jung Chang. She is one of China's best-selling office.

She has written the book Wild Swans, which follows three generations of her family, her grandmother, her mother and herself, through the turbulent history of the country in the 20th century. She has written a number of history books about fascinating Chinese figures from Sun Yat-sen to the Emperor Dowager Sisi. And she has just published a follow-up work called Fly Wild Swans, My Mother, Myself and China. We talk today about how to make sense of Chinese history, how the country has changed over the last hundred years, how the lives of individual Chinese people and particularly women have been determined by large political events over which they had very limited agency. about why it is that when you read Chinese literature, whether famous short story writers like Lu Sun, or indeed the works of Jung Chang herself, you often get a sense of a real social cruelty of family members and neighbors treating each other in very

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