Posted on 28th September, 2025 in Blog posts
WILD SWANS and its author
A speech at the Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism Sixth Form Essay Competition prizegiving, 2024. The subject of the essay that year was WILD SWANS by Jung Chang [Zhang Rong 張戎].
20 years before the publication of WILD SWANS in 1992, I was in Peking trying to understand the contradiction between the picture of Chinese civilisation that I had imbued from history, literature and the accounts of European travellers, and the atmosphere of misery, fear and despotism that I could smell all around me.
Thanks to the work of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest and Leszek Kolakowski, among others, I knew how Russia had been flung back into the dark ages by Lenin’s butchers, but like many other Europeans had absorbed a rosy picture of China under Mao.
Although that picture was shattered in 1989 by the Tiananmen massacre, it was WILD SWANS which helped me, and, since, millions of others, to understand what had happened and – most important, especially in the light of today’s demonisation of China by the USA – to distinguish between the CCP and Chinese people.
Since that time other books have complemented WILD SWANS, but none have had the impact of Zhang Rong’s great work.
I believe WILD SWANS’ impact was greatest in the West. But a subsequent book, MAO THE UNTOLD STORY, which she wrote with Jon Halliday, may have had a different, but even more important impact, in China.
From 2005 until the pandemic, I was at Tsinghua University almost every year to lecture and also visited other universities all over China, from Shenzhen to Jinan. Displayed on the shelves of many of my hosts was MAO THE UNTOLD STORY. And thoughtful journalists, media moguls and officials I met would ask me if I had read it.
WILD SWANS made clear the viciousness of the Cultural Revolution. MAO THE UNTOLD STORY showed us that Mao was in the same category of horror as Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.
Instead of letting China evolve into a modernity of its own, Mao and his gang did their best to destroy a great civilisation and replace it with a slave state. Zhang Rong’s exposure of Mao’s malevolent, savage and catastrophic rule will prove to have been invaluable.
I am very proud that Zhang Rong chose to come to my – our – country and find that here she could tell the truth. And grateful to her, too, for her contribution to our understanding of a terrible period in world history which influences us all yet.