Jung Chang (Wild Swans author) — Living through history's largest man-made famine

Jung Chang recalls Mao’s terror: famine, brainwashing, and survival

1. A.Jung Chang recounts her upbringing in Maoist China, from a privileged communist household to exile as a peasant, barefoot doctor, and factory worker after her father criticized Mao and was tortured and driven insane. She describes how total control, propaganda, and terror produced genuine worship of Mao and made dissent or organized resistance almost impossible, even for top officials such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.
2. B.Chang explains the Great Leap Forward famine as a deliberate policy of extracting grain from peasants to fund heavy industry, magnified by Mao’s profound economic ignorance and catastrophic campaigns such as backyard steel furnaces and the extermination of sparrows. She details the Cultural Revolution as a psychological war on the population, using youth violence, forced self‑criticism, and the breaking of family bonds to atomize society.
3. C.The conversation also explores why today’s Chinese regime still venerates Mao, the role of ideology versus pure power-seeking, why Deng protected the Party rather than denouncing Mao, and why Western intellectuals have often excused or romanticized communist regimes. Chang reflects on how she eventually became a writer in Britain, using her mother’s stories to write Wild Swans and later a critical biography of Mao.