Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China

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In one harrowing episode early in their marriage, Sun fled the presidential palace and used his wife as bait to ensure his escape.

At a time when, 70 years after Mao’s victory, the country’s political leadership contains almost no prominent women at all, that is a particularly apposite message to hear. Sun created his own bank for China but under his name, and listed all its assets in his papers under ‘family affairs’. Jung Chang is the internationally bestselling author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China ; Mao: The Unknown Story (with Jon Halliday); and Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine who Launched Modern China .Trained as a missionary himself in the United States, he found ways for all six of his children to gain American college degrees. She makes such complicated moments in history so easy to understand and after reading this I feel like I’m a FOUNTAIN of knowledge on the politics of twentieth-century China. There are good men and women in this historical too, and Chang is very clear who they were and of her own sympathies with them. A former imperial concubine, this extraordinary woman had seized power through a palace coup after her husband’s death in 1861, whereupon she had begun to bring the medieval country into the modern age. Soong Ei-ling (Big Sister), the eldest of the children, was “the first Chinese woman to be educated in the United States.

While the book is fairly positive on this family you see the Soong's and Kung’s helping themselves to public funds. I wish the focus is more on the sisters right from the start because that last 100 pages was really interesting on how the sisters were being manipulative, empowering and they did play significant roles in China history. Chang relates a strange story that explains how Chiang managed to lose to Mao even though his armies were battle-tested and much stronger than the guerrillas who made up the Red Army. Benefiting from Soviet support, and an alliance with China’s Communist party (CCP), in 1927 Chiang became head of a new, nominally unified nationalist state.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. By turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China. For a biography supposedly focussing on the three most famous women in Chinese history I found it strange that the initial chapters deal with men (Sun Yat-sen and the girls’ father). She miscarried during a traumatic escape, and was subsequently – to her great sorrow – unable to have children.

And he was a violent man with a volcanic temper who frequently beat his first wife and concubines (Little Sister was effectively his fourth wife). I read it as a part of the monthly reading for December 2023 - January 2024 at Non Fiction Book Club group.Charlie Soong, the father of the three sisters has a side of him that is Methodist preacher, and the other, a calculating businessman. Seagrave also wrote a bio on the infamous Empress Dowager Cixi/Tzu Hsi Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China which I also read and enjoyed. As with her previous books, most famously Wild Swans , it is Chang’s sympathetic, storyteller’s eye ― her attention to deeply human detail during the most extraordinary circumstances ― that makes her work remarkable.

The sisters are viewed through the lens of their role relative to men, rather than in their own right.Ailing was not interested and went on to marry a businessman, HH Kung; the couple would accumulate one of the greatest personal fortunes of 20th-century China. As a translator and advisor she is important to her husband (he also seems co-dependent, with her, later his son and maybe his previous wife and concubines).