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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “‘Thousand-Gold Little Precious’: In a Privileged Cocoon (1958-1965)”
At the age of six, one year earlier than most students, Chang entered the best primary school in Sichuan. Admission was merit-based, but that did not stop the precocious girl’s classmates from calling her “thousand-gold little precious,” insinuating that she received special treatment. In 1962, at the age of 10, she transferred to a new school called “Plane Tree.” This was also a very good school—many provincial officials sent their children there—and it was adjacent to the compound in which her family lived, so Chang never had to venture far from her family’s apartment, which, thanks to her father’s rank, occupied an entire floor of one building. The compound itself featured gardens, shops, and its own entertainment venues. Chang says that she “grew up taking hierarchy and privilege for granted” (244).
Like all Chinese children, Chang was taught that the West was “a miasma of poverty and misery” (246). Foreigners were frightening. So were churches. Her brother Jin-ming, however, took a different view of the world. From scientific magazines, which he devoured, Jin-ming concluded that the West in general, and America in particular, must be very impressive. By the early 1960s, after the Great Leap Forward and ensuing famine, Chang’s parents had mellowed and begun to devote more time to family. Her father never abandoned his principles—he insisted that his children must not abuse their privilege as so many Chinese officials’ children had done for centuries—but he did not smother his children with Communist ideology. As a young girl, Chang craved privacy and personal space. While others chided her for lacking “collective spirit,” her father encouraged her and all her siblings to go their own way (256).
Chapter 14 Summary: “‘Father is Close, Mother is Close, but Neither Is as Close as Chairman Mao’: The Cult of Mao (1964-65)”
In 1964, at the age of 12, Chang began learning about “class enemies,” a nebulous term that seemed to apply to anyone who wielded any sort of power outside the Communist Party (258). She heard lectures and saw exhibits on “class education” (260). The details were imprecise—as a young girl, Chang never really knew who the class enemies were—but it was clear to her that she was supposed to hate these enemies and love Chairman Mao. Indeed, she writes that the “Cult of Mao,” which wrought so much destruction in the coming decade, began with this “crude yet effective indoctrination” (263).
Mao had been lying low since the disastrous Great Leap Forward. The new emphasis on class education was designed to resuscitate his image as the nation’s savior. Communist officials, accustomed to sacrificing all for the sake of the Party, did not blink when Mao invaded their families, as evidenced by contemporary song lyrics: “Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao” (264). Few knew that Mao’s self-deification was part of a plan to consolidate his power against the likes of President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, the two men who had steered the nation away from Mao’s catastrophic economic policies.
Mao’s writings pervaded the curriculum. After school, students participated in both sports and hand-grenade throwing, with army-style training designed to harden their physiques and soften their resistance to commands. In 1965, Mao decided that lawns and gardens were “bourgeois habits” and had to be removed, so students took time away from their studies to pull grass and flowers out of the school grounds. Chang remembers the fireworks display in Chengdu on October 1, 1965, the People’s Republic’s 16th anniversary. She also remembers, at the age of 13, feeling that she must devote her life to Chairman Mao.
Chapter 15 Summary: “‘Destroy First, and Construction Will Look After Itself’: The Cultural Revolution Begins (1965-66)”
In 1964, Mao and his wife Jiang Qing launched a crusade against writers and other intellectuals accused of undermining the regime. The famous playwright Wu Han came under attack for a drama in which one of the heroes too closely resembled an old rival of Mao’s. Chang writes that Wu Han’s name appeared on a list of 39 “reactionary bourgeois authorities,” whom Mao labeled “class enemies” (277). Many Party officials, however, including Chang’s parents, had grown weary of Mao’s incessant witch hunts. The Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, refused to print a Mao-sanctioned article denouncing Wu Han. In November 1965, a newspaper in Shanghai finally printed the article, which called for a “Cultural Revolution” (278). The following spring, Chang’s father drafted the “April Document,” which tried to soften Mao’s words by insisting that the Cultural Revolution “debates must be strictly academic,” but by then Mao had maneuvered his way into a much stronger position. Calls for restraint were ignored, and moderate voices from inside the Party were labeled “capitalist-roaders” (279).
Mao moved quickly to institutionalize the Cultural Revolution. He created the Cultural Revolution Authority and placed it under the control of his wife and several other lackeys, including his former secretary Chen Boda. He also succeeded in putting Boda at the head of the People’s Daily, which bombarded the Chinese people with pro-Mao publications. In schools, Mao’s writings encroached on the traditional curriculum and eventually supplanted it. Teaching stopped, and teachers fell under suspicion. Mao despised education and viewed anyone with knowledge as a threat to his absolute authority. Empowered by the new Cultural Revolution regime, students began abusing their teachers, in many cases physically. Many Party officials, professionals, and intellectuals, including Chang’s parents, felt paralyzed with bewilderment and fear.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In her pre-teen years, Chang was privileged, precocious, sheltered, introverted, and loved. Chang did not personally experience the worst of the famine. Having Party officials as parents protected her, at least for a time. The love she felt came from a close-knit family. Her father had mellowed and even doted on her, at least insofar as such doting was possible under the Communists. Her mother was happier too, at least with family life, and Chang’s grandmother was a reliable source of unqualified affection. Precociousness and introversion, however, lay at the heart of Chang’s future restlessness and inner turmoil. Under Mao, when aspiration itself was suspect, precociousness could be a curse. Likewise, introversion had no place in a regime that demanded conformity, collective action, and political theater.
Chang experienced the Cult of Mao as an intrusion upon her regular studies, but she, like nearly all her peers, was quickly and easily molded into a Mao-worshiper. To achieve this, Mao first had to weaken the bonds between parent and child; every despot begins by targeting families, as no tyrant can suffer competition for loyalty. Action followed indoctrination. If children felt a diminished sense of obedience to their parents, then they had no reason to honor their teachers, who ironically had enabled the Cultural Revolution by introducing Maoist propaganda in the first place, creating little Maoist radicals and contributing to their own persecution. None of those teachers, of course, had had a choice in the matter.
Chang remembers Mao wielding godlike power, but it is worth considering whether Mao in 1964 acted from a position of strength or desperation. As a young man in his late teens and early twenties, Chang’s father had given his entire being to the Communist Party, and the will of the Party was indistinguishable from the will of Mao himself. The Great Leap Forward, however, had diminished Mao in the eyes of many Party officials. The mere mention of Mao’s name kept the Chinese public in a trance-like state of obedience, but the spell Mao had cast over Party officialdom was beginning to dissolve. The revolutionaries responsible for the Communist victory of 1949 were now the primary obstacle to Mao’s megalomaniacal ambitions. Mao turned to China’s youth, therefore, in part because young people are easily manipulated but also because he had nowhere else to turn.
