Jung Chang: 'They should take down Mao's portrait from Tiananmen Square'

Jung Chang: 'I care deeply what happens in China but London is home.’ Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

What made you suspect Empress Dowager Cixi was ripe for a biography?
When I was writing Wild Swans [Chang's memoir of three generations of Chinese women], I described my grandmother's bound feet as "three-inch golden lilies". I'd assumed foot-binding had been banned by the communists but discovered that it was, in 1902, the Empress Dowager who outlawed it. That got me interested in her. Also, researching my biography of Mao, I was astonished by the freedom he enjoyed growing up [he was born in 1893 when the Empress Dowager was in power – she died in 1908]. For example, he could travel with a girlfriend, checking into hotels. He had sexual freedom, along with other freedoms that I, growing up in China, couldn't dream of. There was press freedom too. I had thought the Empress Dowager a diehard conservative despot – her reputation in China is still as a vicious villain.

Why has that hung on?
Because as a woman she was not allowed to rule in her own right. She ruled from behind the throne of her son and adopted son. Without research and study, it is not straightforward to decide what her position was. Barely three years after she died, China became a republic. And later Mao and the communists wanted to accuse her of leaving China in a mess. Articulate foes abroad created lies against her.

How trapped was she?
When she came to power in 1861, China was medieval. She wasn't allowed to see her officials. She hated the Forbidden City but was not allowed out of it. She wanted to travel. Yet she had the acumen to judge what was possible. She did not let her personal wish for freedom divert her from reforms.

She got more radical as she got older…
When she came to power she was 25 and from a secluded environment. She didn't know what the west was like. But she had shrewd judgment. She knew an open-door policy would benefit China – her greatest contribution. She had an open mind and was attracted to western ways. She was semi-educated but because she hadn't spent 10 years imbibing incomprehensible classics, her intuitive intelligence wasn't smothered.

You make a fantastic case for her but cannot gloss over her murder of her adopted son. How can this be defensible?
That was not the most painful thing. After all, he had plotted to murder her. She realised that if he survived her, China would land in Japan's lap because they had a hold over him. There would be the nightmare scenario of Japan, which was developing towards being a fascist country, dominating east Asia. It would have been a nightmare for the world – an incredible moral dilemma. I forgave her this act.

How complex was the book to research?
In the Forbidden City there are 12 million documents about her and her dynasty. Teams of scholars and archivists have been analysing and digitising them. Her imperial decrees can now be downloaded. I could look at them from the comfort of my study.

Will the book be banned in China?
If it were, it would be because the regime would not want to promote me. And my conclusions are new, so the book is bound to create waves. But I hope it will be allowed in China.

I'm struck by your descriptions of the oppressive order of palace life. To what extent is ordinary feeling repressed by organised Chinese structures?
Very repressed. What appalled me was the ban on music. After the emperor's death there had to be four years of silence – unbelievable. She loved music. How would you live? There were books but they were classics.

When did you move to the UK and how Chinese do you feel now?
In 1978. My mother lives in China, and a brother and sister. I care deeply what happens there but London is home. I found things I loved here: flowers, grass, pretty clothes, people being nice to each other. In the Cultural Revolution, people were condemned for saying "thank you" too much – it was thought bourgeois, as were books. London was freedom and a lovely life.

Are clothes important? You dress beautifully…
Yes, they are. But the Empress Dowager would spend two hours dressing up… and I never… [she laughs]

You worked with your husband on the Mao book. Has it, though banned in China, made an impact there?
It is the most fantastic thing: a huge impact. The Chinese edition is published in Hong Kong, sold in Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China. Information from our book is on the web and people are debating it.

How did you and your husband meet?
In the 1980s I'd finished my doctorate at the University of York and was making a TV series about China. Jon [Halliday, an historian] was working on a documentary about the Korean war. He was told I might open doors in China. I did nothing of the sort.

What has your mother's influence been?
My mother is 82 and fearless, which gives me courage. She never cautions me. She lets me do whatever I see as right. And it is courageous because she could be affected by what I do.

What one thing would you change in China?
Say goodbye to Mao. Take down Mao's portrait from Tiananmen Square.

You were in the Red Guard at 14. Do you feel as if you were another person then?
No – I was very much me. When I go back to China, my schoolfriends say my personality has hardly changed. I never was a fanatic. Extreme actions make me afraid. I was a reluctant Red Guard. Like the Empress Dowager, I was radical but no extremist.

It sounds like you identify with her…
I admire her for bringing off an incredible revolution in China with minimum bloodshed. I empathise with her.

Jung Chang will be speaking at the London Lit Weekend at Kings Place, London N1 on Saturday

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Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 10: India: A Portrait

by Patrick French A review by Isaac Chotiner

Visiting New Delhi and Calcutta not long after the smashing international success of Slumdog Millionaire I was surprised by the number of Indians who wanted to hear my opinion of Danny Boyle's film. This was a nice inversion of the clichéd traveler's narrative, wherein the visitor solemnly asks the locals about the most recent artistic depiction of their homeland. ("American tourists," a British friend recently informed me, "inquire about The King's Speech and nothing else.") But when I turned the question back on my interlocutors, I was surprised less by the vehemence of the criticisms than by the opposing viewpoints on offer. For every person who described the movie as only the latest Western attempt to sugarcoat the realities of Indian life, there was someone else who admitted to feeling shame that the world had embraced a movie which presented the country as nothing more than a poverty-stricken wasteland. While these two points of view might have contradicted one another, each stemmed from the understanding that India was being intensely examined on the world's stage.

Patrick French's India: A Portrait, which the author calls an "intimate biography of 1.2 billion people," has received a number of hostile notices in the Indian press. As in the case of Slumdog Millionaire, many of the reviews seem concerned with the ways in which India is being interpreted. And a number of the criticisms lend credence to the notion that outsiders describing a foreign country are bound to be reprimanded. Pankaj Mishra, the first-rate novelist and essayist, has slammed French in two separate reviews, accusing him of ignoring India's agricultural sector, minimizing the country's widespread poverty, and making excuses for a new collection of oligarchs who seem completely uninterested in the welfare of the populace. French's best chapter, on the nepotistic character of Indian politics, is dismissed by Mishra as being "blindingly plain" to any "sentient" observer. By this standard, French should not have written about impoverished Indians: Indian poverty is also blindingly plain to anyone who spends a day in the country.

But French's book does exhibit some of the tendencies that have greeted the arrival of a "new" India with rose-tinted glasses. French, whose last effort was an astounding biography of V.S. Naipaul, is certainly aware of the dangers of writing about India, but he has trouble avoiding them. "Nearly everyone has a reaction to India, even if they have never been there," he writes in his introduction.

They hate it or love it, think it mystical or profane; find it extravagant or ascetic; consider the food the best or the worst in the world. For East Asians, it is a competitor and a source of some of their own spiritual traditions. For Americans, it is a challenge, a potential hub of cooperation or economic rivalry -- both countries are diverse and hulking, their national identities strong and to an extent constructed, their populations loquacious and outgoing and admiring of entrepreneurial success.

This cliché-ridden, Manichean passage begs several questions. For example, how many countries have unconstructed national identities? And how many travelers actually think the food in India is really the best or the worst in the world? French admits that these are "old" ways of looking at India, but it is clear from his writing that he finds such categories helpful. He ends the chapter by claiming that "With its overlap of extreme wealth and lavish poverty, its mix of the educated and ignorant, its competing ideologies, its lack of uniformity, its kindness and profound cruelty, its complex relationships with religion, its parallel realities and the rapid speed of social change -- India is a macrocosm, and may be the world's default setting for the future." Almost all of the observations above could be made about nearly every country on earth. Even when French is not consciously romanticizing India, he cannot help but view it as larger-than-life, which is another form of mythmaking. This is a pity, because French is a fine stylist and an excellent reporter, with an eye for the telling detail.

French subscribes to the relatively common view that the country's founding fathers, while heroically dedicated to the idea of secularism, ended up papering over religious differences, therefore ensuring the rise of sectarian Hindu politics. And he tends to support the now mainstream opinion that the centralized state apparatus, whose implementation helped guarantee the country's unity after the arbitrary gashes of partition, was eventually subject to diminishing returns thanks to the creakiness of socialist planning. The problem is that French seems so enraptured by India that his analysis is never quite convincing.

He is certainly not blind, for example, to the awful disparities of wealth that continue to shame the economically expanding nation, but he puts too much faith in the wisdom of India's new class of wealthy businessmen. His account of time spent with Sunil Mittal, the mobile phone service mogul, is embarrassingly gushing. It is certainly true, as Mittal argues, that philanthropy will be an important aspect of India's development going forward. Recent statistics suggest, moreover, that growing inequality in the country may be partially offset by slowly declining poverty rates, and employment opportunities that allow people to transition out of the agricultural sector, and bring in their wake rising levels of self-worth. But when set beside the country's hideous corruption, and increasingly close ties between government and industry, the picture is significantly less sanguine than French's narrative implies. In his interview with Mittal, he raises issues of poverty, but then appears enraptured by the idea of creating an Indian Carnegie Endowment, or something similar. This is one of the sections of his book that, given the scope of the challenges facing the country, feels untethered from reality.

But French's romanticization of the country is conveyed primarily by the grandiosity with which so many of his judgments are rendered. Everything in this account is big or new. It is refreshing that French seems unencumbered by political correctness, and appears willing to engage in observations about what makes something "specifically Indian," but the result is too often observations such as this: "To use a phrase now forbidden to historians, some traits seem like an expression of national character, and are specifically Indian. Reading the country's often vivid press, it feels as if some things only happen in India."

No doubt some things do happen only in India, but then French goes on to tell the story of a quirky taxicab driver, which is a rather universal platitude. Of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, he writes: "Tamils usually have a wide sprawl of a face, in keeping with the southern lushness. The land is rich with vegetation, paddy fields and mango trees, and the view from the coast is filled with fishing boats, long painted skiffs with curved prows, catching kingfish. Young men dive low for stone fruit -- giant blue green mussels, which they pluck off the rocks." This is nicely written, but it is a parody of an island paradise. French no doubt experienced Tamil Nadu, much of which is lovely, in this manner, but the reader wonders how true and complete a picture he is being given as these ravishing scenes pile up.

French shifts skillfully between the micro and the macro, between descriptions of the individual and accounts of historical or political events; and on some of the larger issues he is more reliable than the subject of his previous book. With French one never feels, as one does in Naipaul's excursions to India or Argentina, that the author's biases and prejudices have kept him from setting out on his journey in good faith. If anything, the reverse is true -- and it leads to a somewhat duller and less incisive trip. French's biography of Naipaul achieved a fine balance between the critical and the admiring, but it never slighted Naipaul's astonishing powers of observation. Here the balance is somewhat less measured, and the powers of observation significantly less acute.

Isaac Chotiner is the executive editor of The Book. Since 1914, The New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American culture and politics. At TNR, books, art, film, architecture, theater, dance, and poetry all invite the reader to indulge in the highest levels of aesthetic experience. Subscribe to TNR today for access to literary reviews, pop-culture essays, and nearly a century of writing from the best minds in culture and the arts. Powell's Books customers can save 70% off the newsstand price!

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