Fly Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Jung Chang possesses the rarest of combinations, both moral and physical courage.  As her magnum opus Wild Swans reveals, her parents were both fanatical communists at the start of Mao Tse-tung’s rule.  Her father behaved with incredible cruelty when he forced his new teenage bride to walk hundreds of miles over mountain passes, carrying a pack-pack, whilst he made the journey by car. His reasoning was that she would not be accepted as a member of the Communist party unless she suffered. And suffer she did-  her feet were covered in blisters, she collapsed from exhaustion, had a miscarriage and ended up in hospital in a coma. All this was endured because they worshipped their leader, Mao. She revealed in ‘Mao-The Unknown Story’ just how misplaced that worship was. No marching for him- when he led his troops, he was carried in a litter. The act of hypocrisy which she resented the most was the fact that after he had ordered the destruction of all gardens and deemed it a bourgeois sin to grow flowers he kept the most lavish, floribundant gardens at all his residences. But hypocrisy was the least of his faults- she discovered that he was cruel and malevolent on a scale unmatched by any other human being, including Stalin or Hitler, or even Stalin and Hitler combined.  He not only allowed the ‘Great Famine’ to happen, but  he actually planned it, knowing that tens of millions would die (the figure admitted by a  leading communist party historian is 37.558 million). Chung estimated that he had caused the deaths of well over 70 million of his own people in peacetime, as well as inflicting terrible suffering during the cultural revolution.

In ‘Fly, Wild Swan’ she tells the story of how the research for her book on Mao was carried out and how lucky she was to be able to do the research and find out the truth during a brief period of openness in China, and how the cult of Maoism is thriving in spite of what was revealed.  Now, the Chinese population is once again being indoctrinated into the cult of Maoism.  And there are plenty of useful idiots in the West supporting it. Chang quotes Ken Livingstone, when he was London mayor, as saying ‘One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot-binding of women.  That alone justifies the Mao Zedong era’.  In fact foot-binding had been banned by the Empress Dowager Cixi in 1902, but it beggars belief that anyone should think that one beneficent act would out-weigh mass murder. As Chang describes in her book, Communist China has done everything in its power to silence her and force her to renounce her meticulous, impeccable research on Mao. It is a tribute to her wonderful courage that they have not been able to succeed.

One of the Chinese government’s most egregious acts  towards Chang was to prevent her visiting her dying mother in China.  It is chilling to remember that only recently in this country our own Prime Minister, who considered himself the most liberal and compassionate of men, imposed a blanket ban on any person visiting their dying relative, on grounds which we now know to have been wholly specious. This was positively Chinese in its cruelty and wickedness and shows how perilously close we are to the tyranny of China.