An evening with Jung Chang, author of the bestseller “Wild Swans”

“Wild Swans” by Jung Chang was a bestseller in the nineties. It was a book that defined a generation – the story of “three daughters of China”: Jung, her mother and her grandmother, and their lives during a century of revolution. Chang’s new book “Fly, Wild Swans” tells what happened next. This evening Jung Chang will talk about this.

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“Fly, wild swans” is in many ways Jung’s love letter to her mother. With flashbacks to her family’s experiences in communist China, Chang offers an account of her research into Mao Zedong’s genocidal regime, the many stories she discovered, and the political consequences of publishing her biography. Against the backdrop of China’s development, from the relative freedoms of the late 1970s and the unbridled capitalism of the 1990s to the current authoritarian rule of Xi Jinping, Chang’s latest book chronicles life in a communist dictatorship and the threat that modern China poses to the international world order.

About the speaker

Jung Chang was born in China in 1952. In 1978 she left for England, and she was the first person from the People’s Republic of China to obtain a doctorate from an English university. Her debut Wild Swans was published in 1991 and became a bestseller worldwide. In China, her books are still banned. Meulenhoff Boekerij also published Mao, The Empress and Daughters of China.