Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

 Source of book: I own this. 

 

This was my selection for Banned Books Week. Just as a reminder, I use the week to read books which have been banned, which means that a government has outlawed sale, publication, or possession of the book. I do not count challenged books - those which citizens or parents have sought to keep out of school curricula or libraries. This isn’t because I think challenges are uninteresting, but because I wanted to focus my once-a-year project on those where the power of the state was employed in censorship. I believe that is a different level from a challenge. After all, any library has limited space and budget, and decisions must be made. (Personally, I would have preferred an extra - and local - copy of The Rest is Noise rather than one of the 20ish copies of Eat, Pray, Love.) Likewise, students can only study so many books, and the choice of which to study is a judgment call.

 

Here are my past selections, plus the introduction to Banned Books Week.

 

Thoughts on Banned Books Week

Areopagitica by John Milton (2011)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (2012)

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf (2013)

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (2014)

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (2015)

July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (2016)

Into the River by Ted Dawe (2017)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (2018)

Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith (2019)

 

***

 

As I have mentioned in previous posts about banned books, they tend to be banned for one of two reasons. Sometimes, it is because of alleged “obscenity” - that is, sexual content. This is a fairly new phenomenon, connected with the neo-Puritianism that arose in the 19th Century and culminated in the jihad against all things sexual by Anthony Comstock. Furthermore, the definition of “obscenity” has changed over time and place, and is a moving target at best. 

 

On the other hand, the second reason books are banned has been popular since books were invented: politics. Dictators from time immemorial have been unable to handle criticism, preferring to be treated as gods, and have thus banned books that failed to offer the desired level of worship. 

 

Wild Swans is one of those books. It is still banned in China because of its strong criticism of Mao Zedong. 

 

It is hard to know where to start with this book. It is a dense 500+ pages, filled with so much suffering and hardship, and covering 75 years of family and national history. Chang tells the story of three women: her grandmother, her mother, and herself, and their experiences in China from 1909 through 1978, when Chang immigrated to Britain. 

 

At the outset, I do want to comment that this book really changed my thinking about China, and about the Revolution, and about how much of what we are taught about China here in the US is propaganda. It also helped me solidify my thoughts about how the US has - probably intentionally - misunderstood why revolutions happen, and why “liberating” communist nations hasn’t ended well. 

 

I was also surprised to see just how much Donald Trump is the Dollar Store version of Mao. It is almost as if narcissistic autocrats are cut from the same pattern. I mean, it was spooky. And perhaps one of the reasons that the Right Wing here in the US isn’t honest about China is that honesty would force them to shift from an emphasis on economic systems as the problem to an acknowledgement that dictatorships and totalitarianism are the problem - and are not dependent on a particular economic philosophy. Also, they might have to acknowledge that China isn’t truly communist - it has quite a bit of capitalism - but remains stubbornly authoritarian and unfree. 

 

This is not to say that I support communism - or that the book does. But it does raise the fascinating question of what might have happened with China had Mao been forced out prior to 1958 and power been spread among the more pragmatic and less delusional Party members. 

 

Let’s start with the basic history. Chang’s grandmother was born in Manchuria, to a minor official hoping to social climb. To this end, he arranged that she become a concubine of a wealthy warlord. The child of this relationship was Chang’s mother, who became a communist operative during World War Two. After the revolution, Chang’s parents married and were assigned to Sichuan, where they served as officials and administrators in the Communist Party. Chang’s father was arguably the most ethical and incorruptible government official ever. Unfortunately, Mao’s need to consolidate power led to the Cultural Revolution, where officials were designated as “capitalist roaders” and persecuted and sent to camps. Despite all of this, Chang managed to learn English and get selected to study in England, where she has lived ever since. 

 

Wild Swans is, on the one hand, a deeply personal story. On the other, it is a fascinating inside look at China before, during, and after the Revolution. As tends to be the case with actual history (rather than jingoistic propaganda), the story of China is complex and defies ideological categorization. There certainly are no “good guys” or “bad guys” in the political sense, although there are certainly some good and bad human beings. The various political factions are pretty universally horrible, with the exception of the early Communists, before Mao decided to create chaos and instability to retain his grip on absolute power. All this led to horrible suffering for millions of innocent people, including Chang’s family. 

 

Manchuria itself had it worst of all. At the beginning of the story, China was in a state of cultural decadence and backwardness. Social status was everything, inequality was rampant, and ordinary people we subjected to casual violence and brutality at the hands of the powerful. The detailed rules of who had to “kowtow” to whom were every bit as totalitarian and rigid as the communist ideology would later become. Women were treated as chattel, so they brutalized those below them in status. Foot binding was nearly at an end, but Chang’s grandmother had her feet bound as one of the last before the practice was outlawed. 

 

And then came the Japanese. Who were utterly horrible. After raping and pillaging their way across Manchuria, they tried to exterminate Chinese culture, rewriting history books and replacing Chinese institutions with Japanese ones. 

 

Eventually, the Kuomintang pushed the Japanese out, likewise raping and pillaging their way and killing anyone thought to have collaborated with the Japanese - even under great duress. Under these circumstances, the Communists distinguished themselves by not raping and plundering, and trying to convert, rather than kill, those who disagreed. Up until the Great Leap Forward, the Communists did a tremendous amount of good for China, and living standards for the millions of peasants rose significantly. The reason Mao was able to gain power in the first place was that he actually offered a lot to the Chinese populace, and did enough good to be overwhelmingly popular. Things really only went off the rails starting with the Great Leap Forward in 1958 - when Mao decided that he and he alone knew better than everyone else about everything but agriculture in particular - leading to the greatest famine in human history. (You know what? It turns out that “experts” are actually pretty necessary. You know, scientists and farmers and people with actual experience and knowledge. But Mao believed in his heart that he was the sort of very stable genius that knew better than all those losers...does this sound familiar?) By a combination of inflated estimates of harvests, taking crucial agricultural workers away to collect iron (itself a grandiose project devoid of actual expertise), and forced collectivization, Mao badly messed up China’s agricultural infrastructure, and between 18 and 45 million people are estimated to have starved to death. 

 

Mao’s response to this disaster wasn’t to reconsider and listen to experts, but to purge intellectuals and experienced officials to silence dissent. The Cultural Revolution ended up removing most of the experienced and competent government officials (including Chang’s parents) - people who were, if anything, the most loyal communists - and replacing them with people who were loyal to Mao. Unsurprisingly, this ended up resulting in a bunch of incompetent, vindictive, corrupt, and abusive toadies. (Again, this is precisely Trump’s approach to government…) 

 

This absurd situation reflected not only Mao’s ignorance of how an economy worked, but also an almost metaphysical disregard for reality, which might have been interesting in a poet, but in a political leader with absolute power was quite another matter. One of its main components was a deep-seated contempt for human life...

 

Are we talking about Mao here? Or Trump? Both fit. (As does the Fundamentalist approach to reality and people outside the tribe…) 

 

Both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution devastated the Chinese economy, and disillusioned many who had been true believers in the Communist experiment. China would not fulfil its promise and join the modern world until after Mao’s death. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, survived being purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, and brought needed reform to China. He is perhaps the biggest reason that China is essentially a capitalist economy with significant government-owned businesses. Unfortunately, economic freedom has not led to political freedom or recognition of human rights. That said, the China of today is in many ways a huge improvement on the China of the 19th Century. 

 

So much for the basic outline. Chang is an excellent writer, so the book is filled with fascinating detail, perceptive commentary, and witty and quotable sentences. She really distills the essence of human nature and is able to examine Chinese Communism with great nuance, praising the good while condemning the bad. She also brings out the links between Mao and previous emperors of China, and illuminates the way his need for power and endless warfare led to his disastrous policies. Likewise, Chang offers overwhelming evidence that Maoism was - and is - a religion, a true cult, and thus the Chinese experience resembled other Puritanic religious movements. 

 

In the introduction, Chang tells of her first experiences in Britain, including her discovery of the falsity of all the propaganda about the “West,” the favorite bogeyman of Mao, of course. In addition to her disappointment (!) that pubs weren’t full of naked gyrating women, but just old men drinking beer, she found it difficult to just go wherever she wanted without fear. She also tells of her experience with another ex-pat, who suddenly shared his whole life story. She explains why:

 

It did not seem strange that an embassy official who hardly knew me should bare his heart. In those years, people were so weighed down with tragedies in their lives that they were prone to unburdening themselves suddenly when they sensed a kindred spirit.

 

This is one of so many parallels I found in this book to cultic religion. We survivors of cult groups are perhaps prone to the same thing. Another parallel was in how she describes Maoist indoctrination. She was working on her thesis, and her advisor noted that she had all her conclusions, despite having not actually started her work. This was, from the Western educational point of view, backwards. 

 

That single remark untied a strangling knot fastened on my brain by a totalitarian “education.” We in China had been trained not to draw conclusions from facts, but to start with Marxist theories or Mao thoughts or the Party line and to deny, even condemn, the facts that did not suit them. 

 

This is exactly how Fundies and their “education” works. Intelligence is supposed to be directed toward “proving” the dogma, not investigating and learning. Instead of Marx and Mao, we were expected to use the Bible and the officially approved interpretations thereof. And all conclusions had to match those. Both are, of course, a form of Presuppositionalism, and are at complete odds with reality. And coming to different conclusions than the official dogma gets you punished in any cult, whether Maoism or Fundamentalism. 

 

Side note: also interesting is that Chang rejected communist ideology in significant part once she actually read Marx, and realized that Maoism and Stalinism not at all what Marx envisioned - he would be as shocked today by what has been done in his name as Jesus Christ would be by the Inquisition. In the same way, I myself rejected Evangelicalism in significant part because I read the Bible…

 

Chang also explains the ban on her book in terms of the commitment to deification of Mao. 

 

The regime seems to regard the book as a threat to the Communist Party’s power. Wild Swans is a personal story, but it reflects the history of twentieth-century China, from which the Party does not come out well. To justify its rule, the Party has dictated an official version of history, but Wild Swans does not toe that line. In particular, Wild Swans shows Mao to have criminally misruled the Chinese people, rather than being basically a good and great leader, as Peking decrees. 

 

Hey, that also sounds like another parallel to Trump! He wants his own “patriotic education” to replace the insufficiently jingoistic stuff we have now. (Which is not exactly unbiased, for that matter.) The official version the Trumps (and Fundies) want of American history is one in which white Americans are always the hero, the good guys, and to hell with anyone who says otherwise. 

 

China at the beginning of the 20th Century reminded me a lot of other ancient patriarchal societies. One might even say that it had a lot in common with Ancient Near East culture - the setting of the Old Testament. The treatment of women, for one thing, was quite similar, with the expectation that rich and powerful men would acquire multiple women, often as concubines. 

 

But it was expected that a man like General Zue should take concubines. Wives were not for pleasure - that was what concubines were for. 

 

I am reminded of Demosthenes: “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.” 

 

Chang’s grandmother’s life as a concubine was deeply unpleasant. General Xue put her in a house in her own village, and then proceeded to keep away from her for literally years. She couldn’t leave, she couldn’t have visitors, and essentially the only people she had contact with were the servants and her parents (who she did not get along with, for good reasons.) 

 

Every time she opened her mouth about how miserable she was, her father would start lecturing her that a virtuous woman should suppress her emotions and not desire anything beyond her duty to her husband. It was all right to miss her husband, that was virtuous, but a woman was not supposed to complain. In fact, a good woman was not supposed to have a point of view at all, and if she did, she certainly should not be so brazen as to talk about it.

 

Patriarchy is the same, the world over. And the “christian” version of it is no different. That’s why my wife didn’t fit in and was considered a Jezebel: she had an opinion of her own, stated it openly, and expressed her desire to make her own decisions, not just marry a man and fulfil her duty to him. 

 

Chang’s grandmother’s father was a real piece of work. As soon as his connection with General Xue resulted in social and career promotion, he abandoned his wife and took a concubine. 

 

But my great-grandfather soon began casting around for another concubine; it was good for a man in his position to have as many as possible - they showed a man’s status. He did not have to look far: the concubine had a sister. 

 

Yeah, it was definitely a relief when Xue died and left Chang’s grandmother her freedom. She eventually married a widowed dentist, and had a much happier next part of her life. 

 

As I noted above, women, with their limited options, tended to wield their limited power against each other. 

 

In Chinese tradition the person with the most power over a married woman was always her mother-in-law, to whom she had to be completely obedient and who would tyrannize her. When she in turn became a mother-in-law, she would bully her own daughter-in-law in the same way. 

 

The communists, in addition to reforming patriarchy, sought to do away with this tradition. This led to fears when Chang’s parents married. Fortunately, everyone decided to be gracious about it, and the relationships ended up being quite close. 

 

Moving ahead in time, Chang describes the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Maoists. One of the parts that we Americans tend to gloss over in this history is that communism didn’t just arise out of nowhere. The revolution wasn’t a hostile takeover by a few people that nobody liked. 

 

No, the communist revolutions were driven by genuine injustice: the plunder of the lower classes by the aristocrats and oligarchs. In the case of China, the Kuomintang failed in significant part because the peasants flocked to the communists. Gee, I wonder why? Chang gives one reason: 

 

Many peasants were joining the Communist army, or swinging their support behind the Communists. The single most important reason was that the Communists had carried out a land-to-the-tiller reform and the peasants felt that backing them was the way to keep their land. 

 

Yeah, hard to blame the peasants for that. Here’s a thought experiment. Can you imagine if we used the same idea here? If the migrant farmworkers who feed our nation became owners of small plots of land rather than working for starvation wages for giant agribusiness? 

 

After the Communists took over Jinzhou, hometown to Chang’s mother and grandmother, they immediately put in place some reforms.

 

One of the first acts of the new government was to put up posters announcing its policies: the release of all prisoners; the closure of all pawnshops - pawned goods could be recovered free of charge; brothels were to be closed and prostitutes given six months’ living allowance by their owners; all grain stores were to be opened and the grain distributed to those most in need; all property belonging to Japanese and collaborators was to be confiscated; and Chinese-owned industry and commerce was to be protected.

These policies were enormously popular. They benefited the poor, who formed the vast majority of the population. 

 

Chang points out that this was the first experience of even moderately good government for most of the people. They had seen government used as a way of plundering the poor, and then had suffered under the Japanese. Again: communism didn’t arise out of a vacuum. 

 

Here is another reason why the Communists won: they didn’t exterminate prisoners. The policy was contrary to that of the Kuomintang, who executed captured soldiers. The communists spared anyone who laid down arms. With the exception of high ranking officers, captured soldiers were given the option of returning home or joining the Communists. Many did. 

 

Mao had learned from ancient Chinese warfare that the most effective way of conquering the people was to conquer their hearts and minds.

 

By the end of the war, nearly two million Kuomintang soldiers had defected and joined the Communists. This is what I mean. China didn’t turn communist against its will. The communists won the hearts and minds of the people, and therefore won. These days, both the Republican Party and Evangelicals seem to believe that they can maintain minority rule, that they don’t have to conquer hearts and minds anymore, and can just rule by sheer force. This is a mistake. No minority can rule for long against the will of the populace. It is just too difficult, and requires too many resources. (As Mao found eventually when his “reforms” cratered the economy.) 

 

Oh, one other reason the Kuomintang failed: Chiang Kai-shek made the decision to have a policy of “non-resistance” to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and chose instead to fight the Chinese communists. Hmm. That didn’t play well - the communists were able to offer instead a policy of resistance to Japan. 

 

For that matter, how did so many intelligent and decent people become attracted to communism? Well, for morally upright and compassionate people like Chang’s father (who is a hero in this story), his experience of the suffering of others drew him toward communist ideals. Seeing beggars and starving peasants and the brutality of the Kuomintang contrasted with the bravery and decency of the communists made him determined to see society itself change. That is what many of us are feeling right now. Society MUST change - we are a cruel culture, all too often unconcerned about anyone but ourselves. As long as WE are okay, others - the poor, minorities, LGBTQ people - can go to hell, right? Who cares about them? Well, many of us are rejecting that viewpoint, and that is what terrifies the GOP - and white Evangelicals. Because we are correctly identifying them as the source of this heartlessness and rejecting their poisonous (and reality-challenged) dogmas. 

 

One of the most fascinating parts of the story is how things went wrong under Mao. The Great Leap Forward was typical autocrat arrogance, as described above. But in the aftermath, Mao decided to consolidate power - his had been weakened by the famine, of course. What this meant in practice, unfortunately, is that he had to pit the population against each other, create a stressful and suspicious environment, and replace competent administrators with lackeys. Again, there are a LOT of parallels with other cultic movements. Maoism was shockingly puritainical in many ways, with spouses expected to live apart, beauty in clothing forbidden (hey wait what?), and the beautiful things in life - music, art, flowers, leisure, books - were dismissed as bourgeois decadence. 

 

The worst, though, was who thrived in this toxic environment. Hint: the same people who thrive in toxic religious environments. 

 

The Party’s all-around intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as “thought reform.” Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for “thought examination” was held for those “in the revolution.” Everyone had to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others. The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration.

 

So much of this is actually familiar. In Fundamentalism, we called it “taking every thought captive.” In Gothard’s cult, those “self-criticism” meetings were actually a thing. And there was the constant worry that someone would turn you in for some minor infraction or wrong word. And good lord, it is always the self-righteous and petty-minded sorts that dominate and make everyone else miserable. Chang also points out that the pressure to identify “rightists” meant that those people were free to persecute anyone they wanted - usually as part of personal vendettas. 

 

Chang also points out that the victims of the Cultural Revolution were overwhelmingly the most dedicated and best educated communists - the ones who created the revolution in the first place, but hadn’t been directly controlled by Mao. As Chang’s mother reflects at that time, Mao seems to need to appeal to the worst of human nature. 

 

The revolution had not, it seemed, brought a solution to their problems. Indeed, it had caused new ones. For the first time she vaguely reflected on the fact that, as the revolution was made by human beings, it was burdened with their failings. But it did not occur to her that the revolution was doing very little to deal with these failings, and actually relied on some of them, often the worst. 

 

I am beginning to believe that any dogmatic or ideological movement eventually, no matter how well it starts, become this way. Pragmatism and independent thinking are necessary for long term success, and neither works well with dogma or ideology. As in the case of Fundamentalism (with its book burnings and Anthony Comstocks), Maoism soon took on a strongly anti-intellectual flavor. 

 

The new campaign had been triggered by Mao’s reaction to the behavior of some Communist writers, notably the prominent author Hu Feng. They did not necessarily disagree with Mao ideologically, but they betrayed an element of independence and an ability to think for themselves which he found unacceptable. He feared that any independent thinking might lead to less than total obedience to him. 

 

As Salman Rushdie put it, Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, but about power. Likewise, totalitarianism isn’t about economics, it is about power. Mao distrusted intellectuals because they were difficult to control. Chang’s father, a most ethical and upright man, was also an intellectual, and he steadfastly refused to bow to the cult of Mao. 

 

“Every word of Chairman Mao’s is universal absolute truth, and every word equals ten thousand words!” 

 

That’s idolatry. But it also sounds so much like any cult’s approach to whatever words they decide are sacred. One problem with this, of course, is that words are all too flexible: competing factions both believed they were following Mao. 

 

They verbally attacked each other with Mao’s quotations, making cynical use of his guru-like elusiveness - it was easy to select a quotation of Mao’s to suit any situation, or even both sides of the same argument.

 

Again, so familiar. Proof-texts are used as weapons in any fundamentalist ideology. 

 

There are so many other parallels. Ludicrous denial of reality in propaganda? Definitely. How about this twist on something my grandparents’ generation used to say?

 

When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say, “Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!” 

 

Ironic, that, particularly in the middle of the worst famine in human history. I mean, the First World has its problems, and the US refuses to care for its poor, but overall, starvation is not a First World Problem. 

 

One of the best passages in the book is where Chang takes a look at Chinese history, and concludes that Mao was really just another emperor in a long tradition. The emperor who sweeps away the previous rotten dynasty, backed by the peasants, and is worshipped as a god. He then turns the country back to the golden age of the past, isolates from the rest of the world, and...well, there you go with a cult of personality. And a personality that did not understand how to build, only how to tear down. 

 

Mao found the idea of peaceful progress suffocating. A restless military leader, a warrior-poet, he needed action - violent action - and regarded permanent human struggle as necessary for social development. His own Communists had become too tolerant and soft for his taste, seeking to bring harmony rather than conflict. There had been no political campaigns, in which people fought each other, since 1959!

 

Again, you can see this in the Trump movement. While Trump himself is a coward, his Proud Boy followers are itching for a civil war, for a chance to prove they aren’t “soft.” The problem is, destruction isn’t the way to build a nation. Deng Xiaoping eventually did the building, but China’s development was set back decades by Mao’s policies. 

 

From 1959 on, the book reads like a never-ending series of political purges, of social upheaval, of infighting between groups - all of it encouraged by Mao. Students against teachers, peasants against bureaucrats, ethic group against ethnic group. Mao tapped into ancient resentments and new grievances alike. In the case of the students, Chang notes that Mao chose students because they were irresponsible, ignorant, and easy to manipulate. Soon after, all schooling was suspended for a six-year period - again, setting China back years. Society went from courteous and respectful to aggressive and militant - again, driven by Mao’s encouragement. 

 

Eventually, things get bad enough that Chang’s father writes Mao personally, leading to his arrest and imprisonment in a camp. As he says, “This is no ordinary fire. It concerns the life and death of so many people.” Many of us feel the same way about US politics right now. 

 

Chang’s parents were just two of the many victims of the Cultural Revolution. And, as in their case, most of the victims were beyond innocent. They had been the most faithful servants of the people. But, as the Chinese saying goes, “Where there is a will to condemn, there is evidence.” (Hey, sounds a bit like the way we treat minorities and the poor in our criminal system. Just saying.) 

 

In the end, the Cultural Revolution was a disaster for China, creating nothing, destroying much, and ultimately propping up the worst of the ideas and practices of the past. 

 

The Cultural Revolution not only did nothing to modernize the medieval elements in China’s culture, it actually gave them political respectability. “Modern” dictatorship and ancient intolerance fed on each other. Anyone who fell foul of the age-old conservative attitudes could now become a political victim.

 

Ever wonder why Trumpism combines an aspiration toward dictatorship AND ancient intolerances? They go together. 

 

I also found it fascinating how Chang portrays her own personal philosophical journey. In her teens, she makes the first breakthrough. 

 

It was from this time that I developed my way of judging the Chinese by dividing them into two kinds: one humane, and one not. 

 

This becomes a recurring theme in the last third of the book. Ideological identification, group membership, and social position don’t really matter. There are just some people who do the little things to make people’s lives less hard, and those who do not. It is disappointing to realize this, often, because the people you thought were humane turned out to...not be that way at all. Instead, they are all too eager to harm others outside the tribe. What is fascinating in addition is that when I was younger, partisan identification didn’t tend to track with humane attitudes that much. Gradually, however, the American Right Wing took on cruelty as a central plank to the platform, starting with blaming the working poor for their poverty. In the Trump era, this has become open and inescapable, where cruelty itself seems to be the point. Thus, there are few humane people left on the right in our country, the decent people having been pushed out to either switch parties, or more often, abandon party affiliation altogether. 

 

Later, after a stint working as a peasant (for “reeducation”), Chang is able to read the few books that survived from the burning of her father’s library. In particular, she comes to love Lu Xun, her father’s favorite writer. 

 

Lu Xun had been my father’s great favorite. When I was a child, he often read us essays by Lu. I had not understood them at the time, even with my father’s explanations, but now I was engrossed. I found that their satirical edge could be applied to the Communists as well as to the Kuomintang. Lu Xun had no ideology, only enlightened humanitarianism. His skeptical genius challenged all assumptions. He was another whose free intelligence helped liberate me from my indoctrination. 

 

I see here the elements that also helped liberate me from my indoctrination. Satire is such a powerful technique - evil will always be popular, but the ridiculous? Not so much. (Stolen from Oscar Wilde…) Likewise, ideology kills, but enlightened humanitarianism heals. In order to act in that way, however, one must reject ideology and embrace skepticism and free thought. I may have to locate some Lu Xun. 

 

Eventually, Chang went to the university, only to find out that nobody was really learning anything. Ideology was everything, and ignorance was glorified. 

 

I found this environment unbearable. I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule. 

 

People wonder sometimes why I and others like me react so strongly to both religious fundamentalism and Trumpism. This is a huge reason why. We cannot accept the glorification of ignorance - willful ignorance - and we will not accept its right to rule over us. 

 

Finally, Chang comes to realize that the things she was naturally inclined toward were the very things she had been taught were the “evils of the West. 

 

By then I had come to the conclusion that it was a wonderful place. Paradoxically, the first people to put this idea into my head were Mao and his regime. For years, the things to which I was naturally inclined had been condemned as evils of the West: pretty clothes, flowers, books, entertainment, politeness, gentleness, spontaneity, mercy, kindness, liberty, aversion to cruelty and violence, love instead of “class hatred,” respect for human lives, the desire to be left alone, professional competence. 

 

As ironic as Chang’s experience, I too left the Right Wing for those very reasons. Of course, in my case, those things were the very things I had once thought were universal American values. I was very, very wrong. All it takes right now is a look at the Trumpist ideology to realize that all those things in the list above are condemned as “soft,” “effeminate,” “weak.” It is stuff like this that makes it clear that Trump has more in common with Mao than with aspirational American values. Sure, he is the dollar store cheapo knockoff, but the basic ideas are still there. 

 

The saddest scene in the book is the death of Chang’s father. Years of persecution aged him before his time, but his death of a heart attack - untreated - was probably preventable. 

 

For days I wept in silence. I thought of my father’s life, his wasted dedication and crushed dreams. He need not have died. Yet his death seemed so inevitable. There was no place for him in Mao’s China, because he had tried to be an honest man. He had been betrayed by something to which he had given his whole life, and the betrayal had destroyed him. 

 

This is where the “what might have been” comes in. What if Mao had stepped aside like George Washington, or been forced out after the end of the civil war? What if a pragmatic group of administrators had ended up in power, and established some sort of democtratic socialist government instead? What if, instead of refusing to recognize China, the United States had established diplomatic contact early on, and used its influence for good, rather than trying to starve China into accepting the return of the Kuomintang? These questions are kind of along the line of “what if Trotsky had beaten out Stalin?” Who knows what might have been? 

 

It is possible to imagine that a uniter had taken over China in the 1950s, continued the modernization and the reform of ancient prejudices, and led China to superpower status during the Cold War. Without the famine, the purges, the neverending fueling of conflict and resentment, it seems plausible. Indeed, when Deng took over, China made a true Leap Forward. By ending much of the conflict, and embracing reality over dogma, China was able to accomplish so much more. Millions whose talents had had no outlet under Mao now had options. 

 

This is not to say that China is a model country. It is still largely totalitarian, and far from free. It is not a place I would prefer to live, as I cherish the ability to speak my mind. (Even while I know that under a Trumpian world, I would be one of the first purged.) That said, the relationships between communism, socialism, and totalitarianism aren’t black and white, good and evil, or easy to generalize. China went from a horrifically corrupt dictatorship to a system of authoritarian capitalism with various forms of economic arrangements in between. The golden age, if there was one, was probably the early communist government, with idealists like Chang’s father running things. 

 

The reason I think the history is so important to understand now is that it is a myth that economic systems and governmental systems are linked, with capitalism and freedom on the one side, and communism and totalitarianism on the other. Actually, we should have realized this from the Nazis, who were pretty kleptocapitalist and anti-communist while being one of the worst totalitarian regimes in history. Likewise, today, China has managed to combine largely capitalist economics (increasingly so since Deng took over) while arguably becoming even more authoritarian. On the other side, you have countries like Finland, Norway, and Sweden, all of which are rank high on both socialism and on freedom. It is, shall we say, more complicated.

 

As I mentioned throughout, I also saw significant parallels between authoritarian states and authoritarian cults. I think we need to understand that link as well. Whenever dogma trumps reality, whenever the words of a leader or text matter more than people, whenever free thought is punished, you have the makings of both a cult and a totalitarian regime. 

 

I have said a lot in this review, but there is so much I didn’t mention. There is so much heartrending hardship that the family endured, primarily the women, but their resilience and love for each other is inspiring. This book is a rich and compelling story, a crash course in history, and a philosophical defence of ethics, compassion, and freedom.