Jung Chang, writer: ‘If people thought China was so wonderful, they would go there’

Jung Chang, writer: ‘If people thought China was so wonderful, they would go there’

Jung Chang rose to fame in 1991 with her memoir Wild Swans, an odyssey based on the life of her grandmother, who became the concubine of a warlord general during the Chinese empire; her mother, a Communist leader who was later persecuted; and herself, a young woman in the Chinese Red Guard disillusioned after the devastating repression of the Cultural Revolution. That young woman, born 73 years ago in Yibin (Sichuan, China), managed to go to Lon…