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 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “‘Soar to Heaven, and Pierce the Earth’: Mao’s Red Guards (June-August 1966)”
Chang writes that to achieve maximum fear among the “capitalist-roaders” (Party officials) and “reactionary bourgeois authorities” (professionals, intellectuals, etc.), Mao needed something akin to a private army. He found it in China’s youth. In the summer of 1966, millions of young people, many of them teenagers, joined Mao’s Red Guards. Abuse of teachers intensified. Acting under the Cultural Revolution Authority’s broad mandate, the Red Guards unleashed terror and violence against everything “old”—"old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” (288). House raids became commonplace. Much of China’s culture, including books, paintings, and centuries-old artifacts, was destroyed.
Intoxicated by their newfound power, Mao’s Red Guards behaved like a paramilitary organization with one objective: to destroy. Children redirected traffic in Chengdu (Why should “revolutionary” red mean “stop”?). Roving bands of Red Guards shut down restaurants and other “decadent” establishments (294). Chang herself, not yet 14 years old, participated in the forced shuttering of a local teahouse, the sort of place which, in saner times, she would have loved to frequent.
Predictably, just as Mao had turned one segment of the population against others, the Red Guards now began to turn against their peers. Chang notes that some Red Guards adopted a “theory of the bloodline,” which divided children into three categories: “red” for those with solid, revolutionary family backgrounds; “black” for those who were stained with counterrevolutionary connections; and “gray” for “ambiguous families” (299). Red Guards raided the home of Chang’s friend, a girl named Ai-ling, beat up the older members of her family, and shaved half of Ai-ling’s head—all because she was a “black.” Chang also watched as another young girl labeled “black” and a class enemy jumped out a window in an attempted suicide. Chang says that she spent that night “terrified and shaking” (302).
Chapter 17 Summary: “‘Do You Want Our Children to Become “Blacks”?’: My Parents’ Dilemma (August-October 1966)”
The Cultural Revolution descended into the Red Guards’ reign of terror, leaving many people bewildered, including Chang’s parents. Chang’s father decided to write a letter to Chairman Mao, but her mother warned him against doing anything that smacked of dissent, saying, “Do you want our children to become ‘blacks’?” (304). As the author of the “April Document” calling for moderation, however, Chang’s father had already become a prominent target of the youth-driven mania. Sichuan University students denounced him in person at a mass meeting on August 26. Chang relates that five days later, officials from his department arrived at the family apartment and took Chang’s father “under protection,” which, in “the regime’s hypocritical style,” meant custody (307).
Chang’s mother went to Peking to plead for her husband’s release. Since the August 26 incident, Chang’s father had finished his letter. Her mother took the letter to Peking and showed it to Vice-Premier Tao Zhu, who agreed that Chang’s father had acted appropriately and should be released. Due to his sympathy for persecuted Communist officials, Tao Zhu eventually became the object of Mao’s wrath. Meanwhile, Sichuan officials resisted Tao Zhu’s order.
With her parents under suspicion, Chang nonetheless joined the Red Guards. It was simply the thing to do; at 14, Chang could not connect the Red Guards to her family’s predicament. Repelled by violence, and naturally averse to collective activities of any kind, Chang spent much of her time hanging out with a handful of other girls in the school reception office. One night, a middle-aged woman appeared in the office and told the students that a woman from her neighborhood owned a portrait of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek. A band of Red Guards drove to the accused woman’s apartment and savagely beat her, but they did not find a portrait. The middle-aged accuser was merely settling a score.
Chapter 18 Summary: “‘More Than Gigantic Wonderful News’: Pilgrimage to Peking (October-December 1966)”
The Cultural Revolution spared no one, including Chang’s siblings. Her grandmother and youngest brother had joined her mother in Peking, but her sister and two brothers all participated in the Red Guards, albeit with mild enthusiasm. Her oldest brother, Jin-ming, the science aficionado and admirer of the West, belonged to a youth “gang” composed of his friends, and in 1966 the gang merged with the Red Guards. Jin-ming hated the Cultural Revolution, bristled at its militant activities, and was denounced by his fellow guards. With schools closed to learning and his family scattered, Jin-ming left Chengdu on a sightseeing tour and stayed away from the city for months. Chang’s 15-year-old sister Xiao-hong did likewise. In early October, without warning, Chang’s father returned home, followed a few days later by her mother, grandmother, and youngest brother. With her family restored (temporarily, as it turned out), Chang set out on a Red Guard pilgrimage to Peking, where she and all her peers hoped to catch a glimpse of Chairman Mao.
After arriving in Peking, Chang and her Chengdu contingent were assigned to dormitories at Qinghua University. The girls in her group—Chang and five friends from what used to be their school—did some sightseeing and sang songs, all of which featured Maoist quotations. They visited Mao’s old house, now a museum, and discovered that Mao’s parents had been rich—a confusing revelation, to be sure. On campus, they experienced military-style regimentation. Having unleashed China’s youth, Mao now sought to mold them into a proper army. Chang loathed collective activities, but that did not matter to her in late November 1966 when she learned that she and her comrades would have the honor of seeing Chairman Mao in person. The next day, at Tiananmen Square, Chang saw the Chairman’s motorcade, got a good look at beleaguered President Liu Shaoqi, but sank into despair because she saw Mao himself only for a moment, and from where she was standing, she could not see his face. She briefly considered suicide.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
Totalitarian regimes command people to destroy their past. Burning old books, defacing or toppling statues, renaming streets in accordance with the hysteria of the moment—these are preludes to the worship of something new. Likewise, totalitarian regimes nearly always produce something akin to a “bloodline” or “family background” test, which uses a contrived identity or racial theory to divide people and make them easier to control. Notwithstanding her superior intelligence and natural decency, Chang did not see these things as they unfolded or even as she participated in them. Not many teenagers could understand such things, particularly when the adults in their lives appear to endorse them.
Chang’s father saw the Cultural Revolution for what it was, and he hated it, but he also found himself in a predicament at least partly of his own making. As a Party official, he had taken the initiative he could take when he tried to stave off persecutions by drafting the 1966 “April Document.” He had plenty of authority to implement policy but none whatsoever to make it. This was his conundrum: what to do in the face of disastrous Party decisions? Having long ago surrendered his autonomy, Chang’s father could do nothing but write a letter to Mao. Modern readers might regard this as a naïve and foolhardy venture, but Chang’s father’s decision to write to Mao follows from the logic of complete submission. In the same way that slaves must plead with their masters, Party officials, even highly-placed provincial ones, reveal their fundamental impotence by submitting such appeals.
Chang’s pilgrimage to Peking also demonstrates an important result of her youthful indoctrination. On a visit to Mao’s childhood home, she discovered that Mao’s parents had been rich peasants, which confused her because rich peasants were supposed to be class enemies. This contradiction and the question it raised in her mind, she writes, “frightened me so much that I immediately suppressed it” (324). Then, when she caught only a brief glimpse of Mao in person, she thought about suicide. These were programmed reactions. Neither the immediate suppression of a dangerous question nor the overwhelming-yet-transient feeling of despondency proceeded from careful reflection. Indoctrination produces instant self-censorship and all-consuming adulation.
