Jung Chang

Jung Chang became internationally famous for her autobiographical novel Wild Swans, which took the publishing world by storm on its release in 1993.

The work chronicles the story of her family in 20th century China, from the marriage of her grandmother to an ageing warlord in the 1920s, to the fate of her mother, Xia De-hong ('wild swan'), in 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, when she worked as a Red Guard and a peasant 'bare-foot doctor', before leaving China in 1978 to study in Britain.

The book became an international bestseller, was translated into 30 languages and sold over 10 million copies, receiving high praise from authors such as J. G. Ballard. It remains banned in mainland China, though pirated versions and translations are available in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

More recently, in 2005, Jung Chang published an 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written in collaboration with her husband, historian Jon Halliday. It's a highly critical but highly-acclaimed description of Mao Zedong's life and work, noted by the New York Times Book Review as 'A magisterial work... This magnificent biography methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao's claim to sympathy or legitimacy... A triumph.' 

In this episode, Chang talks about her life and history, and how it inspires her writing. She describes writing the Mao biography in collaboration with her husband, what drove her to do it, how she began to tackle such a complex subject, and how it took them over ten years to write…