Chinese-British · b. 1952
Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan, to Communist officials, joined the Red Guards at fourteen, and then watched her father be denounced, beaten and broken and her mother paraded through the streets. She worked as a peasant, a barefoot doctor and an electrician before the universities reopened, studied English, and in 1978 won a scholarship to Britain, becoming one of the first students from the People's Republic to take a doctorate there. Wild Swans, published in 1991, told her grandmother's, her mother's and her own story and has sold more than thirteen million copies in some forty languages. It is banned in China. With her husband Jon Halliday she wrote Mao: The Unknown Story in 2005, a hostile biography that provoked a decade of argument among historians, followed by a life of the Empress Dowager Cixi and a joint biography of the three Soong sisters. She lives in London.