61 pages • 2 hours read
Jung ChangWild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “‘Suffering Will Make You a Better Communist’: My Mother Falls Under Suspicion (1953-1956)”
In Chengdu, Chang’s mother became head of the Public Affairs Department for the city’s Eastern District. She was also pregnant again. Her fourth child, Chang’s brother Xiao-hei, was born on September 15, 1954. Afterward, doctors had to perform a major operation to find a missing fragment of her placenta. Notwithstanding the birth and its dangerous aftermath, Chang’s father chastised a colleague who had violated Party rules by sending a car to pick up Chang’s mother from the hospital. As always, Chang’s father put the Party ahead of his wife and family. Meanwhile, with their revolutionary parents consumed by work, all four children–Chang and her three siblings–were sent to different boarding nurseries.
In July 1955, Chang’s mother learned that she and her fellow employees would have to remain “on the premises until further notice.” Mao had launched a campaign against “hidden counterrevolutionaries” inside the Party (190). Everyone would be investigated. It was a paranoid witch hunt, but the Party stopped at nothing. Chang’s mother was placed under constant surveillance. Investigators questioned her old Kuomintang connections. For six months, she was detained at her workplace, forced to attend mass rallies at which supposed counterrevolutionaries were denounced and persecuted, and separated from her family. Her husband never called or visited. After six months, she was permitted to visit her children in their nurseries. Chang was four years old. She remembers crying and struggling to keep herself awake so her mother would not leave and “disappear again forever” (199).
Chapter 11 Summary: “‘After the Anti-Rightist Campaign No One Opens Their Mouth’: China Silenced (1956-1958)”
In 1955, while Chang’s mother was detained, Mao intensified Communist efforts to collectivize all farming and nationalize all industry. Private business would disappear. The government would own everything. Notwithstanding suspicions raised against her, Chang’s mother helped supervise this process in her district. Officially, she was labeled “employed but under control and surveillance” (201). It took until the end of 1956—18 months after her initial detention—for the Party to determine that she had been truthful about her past Kuomintang connections. By the time she was cleared, Mao had launched another campaign against supposed counterrevolutionaries, this one couched in the language of liberalization.
Mao’s Hundred Flowers policy, launched in spring 1956, promoted intellectual and creative freedom in the arts, literature, and science. In 1957, having lulled the educated classes into false security, Mao encouraged Chinese writers to “criticize officials all the way to the top” (209). Duped by the Hundred Flowers policy, and unaware of Mao’s broader purpose to draw “snakes out of their lairs,” thousands of intellectuals took Mao at his word, wrote criticisms of the Party, and subsequently were denounced as “rightists” (211). Chang’s mother, still reeling from her detention, now faced the ugly prospect of having to participate in the persecution of supposed rightists in the Eastern District of Chengdu. (Mao had arbitrarily said five percent of intellectuals needed to be purged). She bristled at the task and delayed as long as she could. Her boss, Mr. Ying, threatened to label her a rightist. She was saved from another round of torment, however, when Li Jing-quan, first secretary of the Sichuan Party Committee and therefore much higher in the Party hierarchy, accused Mr. Ying of being a rightist.
Chapter 12 Summary: “‘Capable Women Can Make a Meal Without Food’: Famine (1958-1962)”
In 1958, Mao launched the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Chang writes that all of Chinese society was to be enlisted in steel production, which, according to Mao’s “half-baked dream,” would propel China to superpower status (219). Chang remembers searching for nails and other metal objects on her walk to and from school at the age of six. At the same time, Mao ordered all peasant farming to be organized into “people’s communes” of between 2,000 and 20,000 households (221). In both industry and agriculture, Mao set absurd and fanciful production goals. Rather than risk disappointing Mao, production teams made false reports about spectacular output and unprecedented yields. False reports led to increased quotas, and the circle of lies continued. Commune leaders who failed to exaggerate became suspect, fresh victims for another round of state-sponsored persecutions. Chang writes that most people “did not believe in the ridiculous boasting, but fear of being accused themselves drove them on” (223).
It was a recipe for catastrophe. Agriculture took a backseat to steel production, resulting in a thin 1958 harvest. Chang’s father saw what was happening and wrote to the Central Committee in Peking, protesting the waste of resources on steel production. His superior did not forward the letter, warning Chang’s father against developing a reputation for dissent. Meanwhile, at a Party Conference in Lushan during the summer of 1959, defense minister Marshal Peng Dehuai criticized the Great Leap Forward. Mao made sure that Peng’s comments were circulated among lesser Party officials, who were then asked to give their opinion. For the first time, Chang’s father put his wife ahead of the Party by warning her that it was a trap. Indeed, another anti-rightist purge ensued against those who agreed with Peng.
Despite opposition to Mao at the Party’s highest levels, it was too late to do anything about the immediate problem of severely diminished food supplies. Mao had unleashed a famine. With Communist officials as parents, the Chang children did comparatively well, although everyone in Chengdu suffered from at least a degree of malnutrition. Elsewhere, some of Chang’s relatives starved to death, including Chang’s great-aunt Lan and her husband, “Loyalty” Pei-o. The toll was highest in the countryside, where most of China’s 30 million victims perished. Chang’s parents were shaken, particularly her father, who suffered “deep depression” and “was no longer the assured puritan of yesteryear” (235). Mercifully, in 1961 President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping assumed greater control over the economy, as Mao temporarily retreated. On January 17, 1962, Chang’s youngest brother, Xiao-fang, was born.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The events of 1955-1962 shook Chang’s parents and decimated the Chinese population. Mao’s deceptions and persecutions should not have surprised Chang’s father. He had witnessed something similar at Yan’an in 1942 when Mao first encouraged the Party’s young students of Marxism-Leninism to criticize their superiors and then punished those who took him at his word. With the publication of Marshal Peng’s letter and subsequent invitation to comment, Chang’s father warned his wife not to fall for it. Until that time, he had behaved with unquestioning devotion to Party, ignoring Chang’s mother during her 1955 detention and leaving her to seek comfort in official Party claptrap such as “suffering will make you a better Communist” (196). Chang suggests that this sort of platitudinous nonsense had always been enough to sustain the faith of a zealous revolutionary, but now even Chang’s father felt a flicker of dissent.
The conduct of the Chinese people at the outset of the Great Leap Forward offers a lesson in the psychology of dictatorships. Truth is the first casualty of totalitarian violence against the individual soul. By 1958, the capacity for free and rational thought had atrophied in the minds of many Chinese people. Ludicrous reports of impossible agricultural and industrial output could occur only in a regime that already had the only acceptable answer to every question it asked. Chang writes that the Great Leap Forward “was a time when telling fantasies to oneself as well as others, and believing them, was practiced to an incredible degree” (222). Wild exaggerations became practically mandatory. In 1959, President Liu Shaoqi, a skeptic of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (Liu held the office of president, but Mao maintained the chairmanship of the Party), visited a commune near Chengdu and asked questions of the peasants who worked there. Chang writes that the peasants simply “smiled and mumbled,” for they had no way of knowing whether the president wanted to hear the truth (he did) and, in any case, they judged that “it was better to offend the president than the local bosses” who ran the commune with an iron fist under Mao’s sweeping authority (230). In short, even when it was possible to discern the truth, the totalitarian system found a way to keep it hidden.
Modern readers have no real frame of reference for the mass starvation that claimed the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people in the early 1960s. The Western world’s last subsistence crisis probably occurred in the early 19th century, when agricultural production fell due to global cooling after the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano in the South Pacific. Mao also tried to blame the famine on “unprecedented natural disasters” (234). Many Party officials, including Chang’s parents, knew better. In fact, on a visit to Peking in 1959, Chang’s father overheard several senior officials complaining about Mao. Perhaps the most telling indication of culpability came from Mao himself. In a Party that had consolidated its authority by cultivating the myth of its chairman’s infallibility, Mao’s later abandonment of the Great Leap Forward spoke volumes.
