{"id":4437,"date":"2011-10-18T19:17:46","date_gmt":"2011-10-18T18:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=4437"},"modified":"2011-10-18T19:17:46","modified_gmt":"2011-10-18T18:17:46","slug":"wild-swans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wild-swans\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Swans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?lt1=_blank&#038;bc1=FFFFFF&#038;IS2=1&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;t=thewidblo-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;m=amazon&#038;f=ifr&#038;ref=qf_sp_asin_til&#038;asins=0007176155\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" align=\"right\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe>I just finished reading <i>Wild Swans<\/i> by Jung Chang (or rather, ?? Zh?ng R\u00f3ng).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure most people read it when it came out in the 1990s, but it somehow slipped under my radar and I only discovered it now.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s basically a history of mainland China from 1909 to 1978, as seen through the eyes of three women: Jung Chang, her mother and her grandmother.  (The title of the book is due to the Chinese word ? h\u00f3ng &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Swan_Goose\">swan goose<\/a>&#8220;, which forms part of two of their names.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a really good read, and although it&#8217;s of course not a proper, objective account of Chinese history, it nevertheless gives a very good feel for what happened there, especially during the Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n<p>The only caveat I&#8217;d add is that Chang&#8217;s father was a very highly placed Communist official before the Cultural Revolution, so I think her account of the years leading up to it is likely to be too positive compared to how ordinary Chinese people experienced those years.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s definitely worth reading, perhaps even more now than when it was published, given how dominant the PRC has become in the World since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just finished reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang (or rather, ?? Zh?ng R\u00f3ng). I&#8217;m sure most people read it when it came out in the 1990s, but it somehow slipped under my radar and I only discovered it now. It&#8217;s basically a history of mainland China from 1909 to 1978, as seen through the eyes of three women: Jung Chang, her mother and her grandmother. (The title of the book is due to the Chinese word ? h\u00f3ng &#8220;swan goose&#8220;, which forms part of two of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,135],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}