Jung Chang

The book also received critical treatment in the academic world. The Qing dynasty specialist Pamela Kyle Crossley wrote a skeptical review in the London Review of Books. "Chang has made impressive use of the rapidly expanding range of published material from the imperial archives. But understanding these sources requires profound study of the context. [...] Her claims regarding Cixi’s importance seem to be minted from her own musings, and have little to do with what we know was actually going in China. I am as eager as anyone to see more attention paid to women of historical significance. But rewriting Cixi as Catherine the Great or Margaret Thatcher is a poor bargain: the gain of an illusory icon at the expense of historical sense." . In the New York Times, Orville Schell called the biography "a truly authoritative account of Cixi’s rule," and the paper named it one of its 'Notable Books of the Year'

The failures of the Great Leap Forward had led her parents to oppose Mao Zedong's policies. They were targeted during the Cultural Revolution, as most high-ranking officials were. When Chang's father criticised Mao by name, Chang writes in Wild Swans that this exposed them to retaliation from Mao's supporters. Her parents were publicly humiliated – ink was poured over their heads, they were forced to wear placards denouncing them around their necks, kneel in gravel and to stand outside in the rain – followed by 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.

The international best-seller is a biography of three generations of Chinese women in 20th century China – her grandmother, mother, and herself. Chang paints a vivid portrait of the political and military turmoil of China in this period, from the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord, to her mother's experience of 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.

In October 2013, Chang published a biography of Empress Dowager Cixi, who led China from 1861 until her death in 1908. Chang argues that Cixi has been "deemed either tyrannical and vicious, or hopelessly incompetent—or both," and that this view is both simplistic and inaccurate. Chang portrays her as intelligent, open-minded, and a proto-feminist limited by a xenophobic and deeply conservative imperial bureaucracy. Although Cixi is often accused of reactionary conservatism (especially for her treatment of the Guangxu Emperor during and after the Hundred Days' Reform), Chang demonstrates that Cixi actually started the Reforms and "brought medieval China into the modern age." Newspaper reviews have also been positive in their assessment. Te-Ping Chen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, found the book "packed with details that bring to life its central character." Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: "Filled with new revelations, it’s a gripping and surprising story of an extraordinary woman in power. Using Chinese sources, totally untapped by western books, this reappraises one of the great monstresses of modern history… Jung Chang’s revisionism means that this book reveals a new and different woman: ambitious, sometimes murderous, but pragmatic and unique. All of this adds up to make Empress Dowager Cixi a powerful read."

Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005.

Chang became a popular figure for talks about Communist China; and she has travelled across Britain, Europe, America, and many other places in the world. She returned to the University of York on 14 June 2005, to address the university's debating union and spoke to an audience of over 300, most of whom were students. The BBC invited her onto the panel of Question Time for a first-ever broadcast from Shanghai on 10 March 2005, but she was unable to attend when she broke her leg a few days beforehand.

Chang's 2005 work, a biography of Mao, was co-authored with her husband Jon Halliday and portrays Mao in an extremely negative light. The couple traveled all over the world to research the book, which took 12 years to write. They interviewed hundreds of people who had known Mao, including George Bush, Sr., Henry Kissinger, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama. Henry Kissinger called it "grotesque in that it depicts Mao as a man without any qualities." Later he described it in his book "On China" as "one-sided but often thought-provoking."

In 2003, Jung Chang wrote a new foreword to Wild Swans, describing her early life in Britain and explaining why she wrote the book. Having lived in China during the 1960s and 1970s, she found Britain exciting and loved the country, especially its diverse range of culture, literature and arts. She found even colourful window-boxes worth writing home about – Hyde Park and the Kew Gardens were inspiring. She took every opportunity to watch 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".

She has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Buckingham, the University of York, the University of Warwick, Dundee University, Bowdoin College (USA), and the Open University. She lectured for some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before leaving in the 1990s to concentrate on her writing.

Chang left China in 1978 to study in Britain on a government scholarship, staying first in London. She later moved to Yorkshire, studying linguistics at the University of York with a scholarship from the university itself, living in Derwent College. She received her PhD in linguistics from York in 1982, becoming the first person from the People's Republic of China to be awarded a PhD from a British university. In 1986, she and Jon Halliday published Mme Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ching-ling), a biography of Sun Yat-Sen's widow.

According to Wild Swans (chapter 23-chapter 28), Chang's life during the Cultural Revolution and the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution was one of both a victim and one of the privileged. Chang attended Sichuan University in 1973 and became one of the so-called "Students of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers". Her father's government-sponsored official funeral was held in 1975. Chang was able to leave China and study in the UK on a Chinese government scholarship in 1978, a year before the post-Mao Reforms began.

Jung Chang (simplified Chinese: 张戎 ; traditional Chinese: 張戎 ; pinyin: Zhāng Róng ; Wade–Giles: Chang Jung , Mandarin pronunciation: [tʂɑ́ŋ ɻʊ̌ŋ] , born 25 March 1952) is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China.

Chang was born on 25 March 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province. Her parents were both Communist Party of China officials, and her father was greatly interested in literature. As a child she quickly developed a love of reading and writing, which included composing poetry.

As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father became successful as a propagandist 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, or ganbu, in the country. The Communist Party provided her family with a dwelling in a guarded, walled compound, a maid and chauffeur, as well as a wet-nurse and nanny for Chang and her four siblings. This level of privilege in China's relatively impoverished 1950s was extraordinary.