International Bestseller Dr. Jung Chang on Fly, Wild Swans & China's Despotism

In this week’s episode of The Learning Curve, co-hosts Center for Strong Public Schools’ Alisha Searcy and Great Hearts Academies’ Dr. Helen Baxendale interview award-winning author and biographer Dr. Jung Chang, whose international bestsellers have illuminated three generations of her family’s experiences across 20th- and 21st-century China. Dr. Chang reflects on the powerful lessons drawn from the lives of her grandmother, mother, and herself under Chairman Mao’s tyranny, emphasizing the importance of personal memory in confronting totalitarianism and educating younger generations. She discusses the role of her memoir alongside works by figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel in exposing the tragic human cost of 20th century’s most murderous regimes. Turning to her co-authored biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, Dr. Chang offers her assessment of Mao’s character, the catastrophic loss of over 70 million lives under his Communist rule, and the enduring myths and lies surrounding his despotic legacy. She explores China’s rich pre-Communist history, including the often misunderstood reign of the Empress Dowager Cixi, the central role of women in shaping modern China, and her motivations for writing Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister. She also examines Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s (the “Architect of Modern China”) economic reforms in the late 1970s, President Xi Jinping’s revival of Maoist-style political state control, and concludes with a moving discussion of Fly, Wild Swans, as a tribute to her mother, including the final chapter on why she could not return to China to be at her mother’s deathbed.

Stories of the Week: Alisha shared a piece from Forbes, announcing how Michael Bloomberg is creating a charter school-to-HBCU pipeline for Black students. Helen discussed an article from Education Next on how AI changes nothing on what students still need to learn.

Guest:

Dr. Jung Chang is the author of several best-selling books, including Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself, and China (2026); Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China(2019); Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013); Mao: The Unknown Story (2005, with her husband Jon Halliday); and Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China(1991). Dr. Chang’s books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. She has won many book awards and received a number of honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and USA. Born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a “barefoot” doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York – the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university.