Top 70 Jung Chang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “China is more prosperous than before. The people have better lives but they are not happy and confident because the scars are still there.”

— Jung Chang

2. “When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.”

— Jung Chang

3. “Every word of Chairman Mao’s is universal absolute truth, and every word equals ten thousand words!”

— Jung Chang

4. “I no longer have the terrible nightmares that I used to have. Mao had just died in 1976, and China began to open up. For the first time scholarships to go to the West to study were awarded on academic merit.”

— Jung Chang

5. “If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.”

— Jung Chang

6. “When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven.”

— Jung Chang

7. “While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.”

— Jung Chang

8. “At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.”

— Jung Chang

9. “I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule.”

— Jung Chang

10. “Unlike most founding dictators – Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler – Mao did not inspire a passionate following through his oratory, or ideological appeal. He simply sought willing recruits among his immediate circle, people who would take his orders.”

— Jung Chang

11. “If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else.”

— Jung Chang

12. “Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.”

— Jung Chang

13. “The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Works became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings-and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.”

— Jung Chang

14. “Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying “thank you” too often, which was branded as “bourgeois hypocrisy”; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.”

— Jung Chang

15. “My mother could see that as far as my father’s relationship with the Party was concerned, she was an outsider. One day, when she ventured some critical comments about the situation and got no response from him, she said bitterly, “You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband!” My father nodded. He said he knew.”

— Jung Chang

16. “I like to have Chinese furniture in my home as a constant and painful reminder of how much has been destroyed in China. The contrast between the beauty of the past and the ugliness of the modern is nowhere sharper than in China.”

— Jung Chang

17. “I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet.”

— Jung Chang

18. “They were endowed with the qualities of youth- they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a ‘just cause’, thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant, and easy to manipulate- and prone to violence. Only they could give Mao the immense force that he needed to terrorize the society.”

— Jung Chang

19. “Fallowing the custom, my great-grandfather was married young, at fourteen, to a woman six years his senior. It was considered one of the duties of a wife to help bring up her husband.”

— Jung Chang

20. “The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings.”

— Jung Chang

21. “What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.”

— Jung Chang

22. “MAO TSE-TUNG, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.”

— Jung Chang

23. “Few of her achievements have been recognised, and when they are, the credit is invariably given to the men serving her. This is largely due to a basic handicap: that she was a woman and could only rule in the name of her sons... In terms of groundbreaking achievements, political sincerity and personal courage, Empress Dowager Cixi set a standard that has barely been matched.”

— Jung Chang

24. “She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. “Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman,” was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.”

— Jung Chang

25. “Making a lot of noise was considered essential for a good wedding, as keeping quiet would have been seen as suggesting that there was something shameful about the event.”

— Jung Chang

26. “There were no state regulations about hairstyles or clothes. It was what everyone else was wearing that determined the rules of the day. And because the range was so narrow, people were always looking out for the tiniest variations. It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to everyone else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical.”

— Jung Chang

27. “Mao’s instruction to exterminate grass had led to a constant demand for manpower bc of the grass’s obstinate nature.”

— Jung Chang

28. “I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.”

— Jung Chang

29. “I think because of their terrible past, particularly this century, the Chinese have come to accept cruelty more than many other people, which is something I feel very unhappy about.”

— Jung Chang

30. “It was not so much a feeling of being insulted, but an overwhelming pain for the people of my native land. We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves. I thought of the old observation that Chinese lives were cheap, and one Englishman’s amazement that his Chinese servant should find a toothache unbearable.”

— Jung Chang

31. “I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.”

— Jung Chang

32. “I always wanted to be a writer.”

— Jung Chang

33. “I feel perhaps my heart is still in China.”

— Jung Chang

34. “I wanted to look calm, and to let them know that they could not demoralize us. I had no fear or sense of humiliation, only contempt for them. What had turned people into monsters? What.”

— Jung Chang

35. “We in China had been trained not to draw conclusions from facts, but to start with Marxist theories or Mao thoughts or the Party line and to deny, even condemn, the facts that did not suit them. I.”

— Jung Chang

36. “The Chinese language is extremely hard to learn. It is the only major linguistic system in the world that does not have an alphabet; and it is composed of numerous complicated characters – ideograms – which have to be memorised one by one and, moreover, are totally unrelated to sounds.”

— Jung Chang

37. “Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being “too attached to her family,” which was condemned as a “bourgeois habit,” and had to see less and less of her own mother.”

— Jung Chang

38. “When boys played “guerrilla warfare,” which was their version of cowboys and Indians, the enemy side would have thorns glued onto their noses and say “hello” all the time.”

— Jung Chang

39. “A cautionary tale I had carried with me from China, and which I firmly believed, was that anyone who attempted to have a foreign lover would be drugged and carted back to China in a jute sack.”

— Jung Chang

40. “For anyone to open their heart, they need the right atmosphere, and something to prompt them. For my mother it was her trip abroad: she was in a very relaxed, understanding environment. I was very sympathetic towards her.”

— Jung Chang

41. “Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control.”

— Jung Chang

42. “One piece of information that made an impression on her was that individual Chinese lives mattered to the Westerners.”

— Jung Chang

43. “This was what Moscow had intended: peasants must be coerced into doing things that left no way back into normal life. To “get them to join the revolution,” the Party had decreed, “there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.”

— Jung Chang

44. “Mao’s rule was best understood in terms of a medieval court, in which he exercised spellbinding power over his courtiers and subjects. He was also a maestro at ‘divide and rule’, and at manipulating men’s inclination to throw others to the wolves.”

— Jung Chang

45. “Although my book is banned I am still allowed to go to China and travel. There is no longer the kind of control that Mao used to have-there have been deep fundamental changes in society.”

— Jung Chang

46. “Traditional Chinese administration was a well-oiled machine, which, barring a crisis, would keep ticking over. Initiatives were not required and rarely offered. State policies depended almost entirely on the dynamism of the throne.”

— Jung Chang

47. “The idea was that everything personal was political; in fact, henceforth nothing was supposed to be regarded as ‘personal’ or private.”

— Jung Chang

48. “Where there is a will to condemn, there is evidence.”

— Jung Chang

49. “In spring 1907, a Regulation for Women’s Education was decreed, which made it official that women should receive education.”

— Jung Chang

50. “The gung-ho spirit overrode caution, as ignorance triumphed over reason.”

— Jung Chang