Top 80 Jung Chang Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Like many Chinese, I was incapable of rational thinking in those days. We were so cowed and contorted by fear and indoctrination that to deviate from the path laid down by Mao would have been inconceivable. Besides, we had been overwhelmed by deceptive rhetoric, disinformation, and hypocrisy, which made it virtually impossible to see through the situation and to form an intelligent judgment.”

— Jung Chang

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

— Jung Chang

53. “Those touched-up images were not what her mirrors had been telling her for some time.”

— Jung Chang

54. “Both my mother and father regarded a traditional ceremony as old-fashioned and redundant. Both she and my father wanted to get rid of rituals like that, which they felt had nothing to do with their feelings. Love was the only thing that mattered to these two revolutionaries.”

— Jung Chang

55. “Although the Communists were opposed to torture in theory and on principle, officials were told that they should not intervene if the peasants wished to vent their anger in passionate acts of revenge.”

— Jung Chang

56. “The two wills made it unmistakeably clear that it was Cixi’s dying wish that the Chinese should have their parliament and their vote.”

— Jung Chang

57. “In the absence of clear knowledge, rumours have abounded and lies have been invented and believed.”

— Jung Chang

58. “Cixi’s tolerance of attacks on her government-and on herself-as well as her willingness to permit a diversity of viewpoints were rematched by any of her predessors or, arguably, her successors.”

— Jung Chang

59. “Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no time.”

— Jung Chang

60. “A night passed while Cixi dealt with one matter after another, conscious all the time that she just murdered her adopted son. She was forced to stop working at about eleven o’clock in the morning as death was imminent. She died less than three hours later.”

— Jung Chang

61. “The past hundred years have been most unfair to Cixi, who has been deemed either tyrannical and vicious or hopelessly incompetent or both.”

— Jung Chang

62. “It was Cixi who championed women’s liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on its female population-a practice to which she put an end.”

— Jung Chang

63. “Yu Keng had been working under Viceroy Zhang, who put him in charge of dealing with clashes between the local population and Christian missions in the provinces. The bilingual Louisa Pierson was able to talk to both sides, helping to smooth out misunderstandings and resolve disputes.”

— Jung Chang

64. “In China, one was accustomed to a certain amount of injustice.”

— Jung Chang

65. “I wanted no grand mission, no ‘causes,’ just a life – a quiet, perhaps a frivolous life – of my own.”

— Jung Chang

66. “For all her faults, she was no despot.”

— Jung Chang

67. “Looking back over the many horrific decades after Cixi’s demise, one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.”

— Jung Chang

68. “I realized then that when people are happy they become kind.”

— Jung Chang

69. “She was a giant, but no saint.”

— Jung Chang

70. “Her demise would result in civil war, which for Westerners would mean especially the collapse of trade, the default of loans and the emergence of more Boxers. And so, for these overwhelming reasons, the Allies decided not to pursue the empress dowager.”

— Jung Chang

71. “It was all too clear that Cixi was the only person who could hold the empire together.”

— Jung Chang

72. “Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meaning.”

— Jung Chang

73. “Republicanism was not what Empress Dowager Cixi had hoped for, but it was what she would accept, as it shared the same goal as her wished-for parliamentary monarchy that the future of China belong to the Chinese people.”

— Jung Chang

74. “Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless.”

— Jung Chang

75. “A picture of vulnerability, she made the men feel protective and forgiving, happy to use the occasion to help a woman in need. But anyone stepping over a line would see a very different person as County Chief Woo witnessed.”

— Jung Chang

76. “When I arrived in London, although I could manage to read a lot – Nineteen Eighty-four was one of the first books I devoured, marveling constantly at how aptly Orwell’s description fitted Mao’s China – the idiomatic use of English was beyond me.”

— Jung Chang

77. “Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering.”

— Jung Chang

78. “Cixi’s style was not to force through drastic change, but to bring it about gradually through perseverence.”

— Jung Chang

79. “For Cixi, what the Viceroy as done was best left unsaid.”

— Jung Chang

80. “I had experienced privilege as well as denunciation, courage as well as fear, seen kindness and loyalty as well as depths of human ugliness. Amid suffering, ruin and death, I had above all known love and the indestructible human capacity to survive and to pursue happiness.”

— Jung Chang

81. “This signaled the beginning of the end of individual expression in China. All the media had been taken over by the Party when the Communists came to power. From now on it was the minds of the entire nation that were placed under ever tighter control.”

— Jung Chang

82. “The fact that her last enterprise before an untimely death was to introduce the vote testifies to her courage and vision.”

— Jung Chang

83. “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-so her precise role has been little known.”

— Jung Chang

84. “Kind-hearted observers found her full of pathos, and the less generous despised her.”

— Jung Chang

85. “Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval.”

— Jung Chang

86. “Foreign opium imported into China was chiefly produced in British India and shipped solely from British ports.”

— Jung Chang