Wild Swans author Jung Chang: ‘Censorship in China is worse now than it was 10 years ago’

As an adaptation of Wild Swans reaches the London stage she tells Alison Roberts about Eastern oppression, Bo Xilai and the book that has never been published in her motherland
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Alison Roberts19 April 2012

It has been 21 years since Jung Chang published her landmark book Wild Swans, yet it still has the power to terrify and deeply move. Hailed as a masterpiece in the West, it tells the story of brutal political upheaval in China over three generations of her family — beginning with her grandmother, married in 1924 as a concubine to a Chinese warlord, with crushed and bound feet, and ending with Jung herself, who was briefly a Red Guard and eventually a refugee in London. At the heart of the book lies Jung’s mother, a communist official who was denounced, held in detention and cruelly tortured during the purges of the Cultural Revolution.

As an adapted version of Wild Swans finally reaches the London stage, the book itself, which has sold more than 13 million copies worldwide, is still banned in China. In fact, its chances of publication there are slimmer than they were in the mid-Nineties, says Chang — as is any mention of the murderous rule of Mao Tse-tung, the leader of communist China from 1949 to 1976. With this week’s London Book Fair focusing on China, Chang is pessimistic about the literary life of her homeland. “There is a big clampdown today,” she says. “Censorship is worse than it was 10 years ago; it has even changed since the Olympics of 2008.”

Today, almost 35 years since she settled in London, Jung still delights in the prettiest parts of the city and works at home in Notting Hill at a window overlooking a cherry tree. She met her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, in London and calls him “the most priceless treasure I have taken from my adopted country, Britain”. They have no children of their own but she is close to her grown-up nephew, the son of the middle of her three brothers, who also lives here. Chang speaks softly, her English occasionally still hesitant — but she has an undeniable glamour. She is a big fan of the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, and loves the clothes she could only guiltily dream of as a girl.

“In 1993, there was actually a possibility that Wild Swans might get published there,” she says. “A Chinese publisher had typeset it, though with certain cuts of the parts relating to Mao, but then the censor said no .... and today my books are very strictly banned. Ironically, the clampdown is the result of more freedom, which is the result of the web. That is much harder for them to control so they are trying to stay a step ahead of this freedom and at the same time clamp down harder on printed matter.”

“Armies of very smart people,” says Chang, are employed in maintaining the Great Firewall of China, as the country’s draconian system of internet censorship is called in the West. Chang has watched an online discussion of her explosive book on Mao, Mao: The Unknown Story, a 900-page account of the leader’s life written in 2005 with Halliday, disappear before her eyes. “There was a Chinese edition of the Mao book, of course not available in China, and there were a lot of blogs and comments about it, but they were all deleted.

“I’ve seen things deleted in real time. A box suddenly appeared over one discussion saying the ‘item’ was being examined and then, quite soon after, said it had been deleted. It was extraordinary.”

At the same time, she maintains, there are “even bigger armies” of “internet commentators” feeding pro-Mao websites, intervening on forums, posting blogs “to shore up the glorious Mao line” and maintain the legitimacy of Communist rule. “People assume, I think, that economic and social liberalisation inevitably leads to political liberalisation. But it hasn’t. Not in fundamental ways.”

Yet China’s economic boom and its creation of super-wealthy businessmen does not surprise her: “The regime discourages people from being interested in politics, creative writing or literature but encourages them to become successful businessmen. A lot of very intelligent people have gone into business and that becomes the channel to vent their talent. Not the arts.”

Chang herself, who is now 60, came to the UK on a student scholarship in 1978, two years after Mao’s death. She was probably the first person from Sichuan, a province of 90 million people, to be allowed to leave on such a scheme and at first her movements in London were closely watched, though she often escaped her chaperones to wander London’s parks, which thrilled her. “When I first came here, I was ecstatic. Mao had even condemned horticulture as a bourgeois habit — children were ordered to pluck out the grass — so China was a really desolate place. I went for a walk in Hyde Park and, I mean, the green! It was so beautiful.”

At first, she did not want to look back at her past, or to think about it at all — the terror she had felt for her parents, the awful violence she had seen as families were torn apart, children physically abused their teachers, neighbour denounced neighbour; and the hardship she had suffered herself as a teenager when she and her siblings were split up and sent to be “re-educated” in exile among the peasants on the edges of the Himalayas. “For a while in Britain I had nightmares almost every night — unpleasant scenes, always quite bloody, of physical pain or torture. But after writing Wild Swans, they disappeared. Writing the book was my therapy.”

As it was, too, for her mother, who came to stay with Jung in 1988 and told her daughter the story of her life in long revelatory conversations over 60 hours worth of cassette tape. Chang’s mother celebrated her 80th birthday last year, and still lives in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. “We were very worried for her when Wild Swans was first published, of course, and we got her out for a while, but it transpired that she was not harassed or persecuted at all. She is still very feisty, and she is very popular, surrounded by friends.”

Chang is able to travel freely to and from China. “I was at her 80th birthday party and many other elderly people came up to me and said, your mother helped me, if it hadn’t been for your mother I would have been sent to the labour camp ... There is a tranquillity about her now, a serenity.”

And yet, “the government regime does not encourage people to think about the past. Most people are not in the process of turning their past experience into memory. I’m very lucky — I wrote Wild Swans and I can think about the past now without trauma. But I have often met people in China, at dinner parties for example, who seem very calm and cheerful on the surface but have trauma deeply etched on their mind.

“I once met a man who worked in the finance ministry whose childhood had been deeply traumatic. He came from an ‘undesirable’ background and had been bullied and couldn’t go to a proper school or university; and when we started to talk abut childhood, he got into a terrible state and was almost shaking. He was a different man to the confident official of just a few minutes before. And I come across that quite a lot.

“These people need to be able to remember, and to talk about what happened [in the Cultural Revolution]— but that is what censorship stops. Parents are not telling their children these things because they want to keep them away from these taboo subjects.”

When Wild Swans was first published, Jung and her mother visited the tomb of her grandmother and father, the latter also a communist official whose similarly terrible denunciation and physical abuse at one point sent him insane. Her father died in 1975, physically broken by his harsh treatment. “My mother is a very composed person,” says Jung, “but she broke down that day at the tomb and she wept uncontrollably. And I thought, this is the pent-up emotion that millions and millions of people must feel. What are they going through? My mother’s story is told but theirs is not. Theirs is swept under the carpet.”

Right now, of course, the world is learning a little more of contemporary top-level Chinese politics. The death of British businessman Neil Heywood in a hotel room in Chongqing, allegedly poisoned by the wife of now disgraced politician Bo Xilai, has exposed circles of power usually shrouded in secrecy.

Chang welcomes Bo’s downfall: “I think it’s a very good thing this guy fell because he was a huge promoter of Mao, and he did it in a very cynical way. This guy was portraying himself as an anti-corruption zealot. He was torturing people, executing people, for alleged gangsterism — true or not, these cases aren’t going through any legal process — and yet was himself very corrupt. He was one of the top guys, you can see how murky it is. Anyone who promotes the Mao era as the era most free of corruption, who knows Mao was responsible for the death of well over 70 million Chinese ... it makes my blood boil.”

Chang’s next book takes another huge and fraught historical subject — the Empress Dowager of China, a Queen Victoria figure who ruled China for almost 50 years from 1861. She has spent the past few years delving into the 12 million documents archived in The Forbidden City and reading diaries at Windsor Castle — a far less painful or indeed perilous research project than those undertaken for both Wild Swans and the Mao biography.

“I was able to interview people in China for the Mao book in a way that would not be possible today,” she says. “When Jon and I were writing that book, we knew we had discovered material that was really dynamite and we could see the potential danger in that, and I just said to myself: what the heck. We’ll deal with the problem when it comes. Of course we were threatened and yes I did feel frightened but I never once considered not writing that book.” Where does that bravery come from? “My mother. She’s a fighter. So am I.”

Wild Swans is on at the Young Vic until May 13.

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