Outstanding… 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. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is another triumph.” (William Moore Evening Standard) A story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal. Asian Art Newspaper, *Books of the Year* My mother inspired me to ask questions. She came to stay with me in 1988 and said, “I want a serious talk”, and started to tell me stories including how she and my father had to walk from Manchuria to Sichuan, a journey of more than 2,000 miles. My mother suffered a miscarriage on the way. As she was talking, I began to think I must write all this down. The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 70th anniversary on 1 October but it’s been a turbulent year, with the protests in Hong Kong … The book’s strongest point is its nuanced sympathy for the sisters. Ailing and Meiling, in particular, have been periodically lambasted for seeking profit and indulgence, and abetting Chiang’s brutal dictatorship, during the agonies of the second world war. Although Chang records Meiling’s extravagance and addiction to comfort, “little sister” also comes over as surprisingly affectionate and loyal, especially to her family. Ailing – conventionally denounced as a ruthless profiteer – is described as a devoted sister who saw it as her responsibility to provide financially for her less practically minded siblings. In Chang’s account, Qingling is the least appealing: a hard-headed Comintern convert, whose political convictions overrode feelings for her family.

But this is also one of the weaknesses of Chang’s approach. Her books illustrate why theories that emphasize the actions of political leaders as the driving forces of history are out of fashion. For example, the unlikely survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Long March is, given their later rise to power, enormously important for not only China but the entire world. The hagiography of the Long March has been well documented; the CCP has made it a mythological origin story. Chang instead argues that the entire enterprise was only possible because Chiang Kai-shek allowed it, part of a secret deal with Stalin that if Chiang let the Communists in China survive, Stalin would release Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, from captivity in Russia. Apparently, this deal was so secret it was even secret to Stalin. Chang and Halliday went to great lengths to challenge the CCP’s legitimacy in Mao: The Unknown Story, and in Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister Chang wants to finish the job. Mao showed that the Long March was not the feat the CCP made it out to be; here she contends it was entirely because Chiang Kaishek chose his son over China’s future. This makes for a fascinating tidbit, but reduces one of the major arcs of China’s history – the rise to power of the CCP – to a single decision by one man. One of the great challenges for authors writing biographies is their relationship to their subjects. They risk either putting them on a pedestal and explaining away their foibles, or demonizing them and finding evil intent behind every action. Jung Chang has swung to both horns of this dilemma in the past. In Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, she interpreted the historical evidence to claim that rather than the hidebound reactionary she is often portrayed to be, Cixi was a progressive visionary who, had she not been thwarted, would have presided over a golden age of Chinese democracy. On the other hand, in Mao: The Unknown Story , Chang and co-author Jon Halliday so thoroughly and unskeptically demonized Mao that they achieved the unlikely effect of bringing sinologists to write a book about their book itself, Was Mao Really a Monster? Given the three Soong sisters’ existence in the shadows of history, and the staggering might of the men they worked and lived alongside, it was narratively clever of Chang to replicate this tone in her own narrative through Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a monumental work, worthy both of Jung Chang’s Mao and of the great, rambling, heterogeneous Chinese folk epics of the oral past, such as The Water Margin and The Three Kingdoms. Its three fairy-tale heroines, poised between east and west, spanned three centuries, two continents and a revolution, with consequences that reverberate, perhaps now more than ever, in all our lives to this day.” (Hilary Spurling Spectator)They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the centre of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. From left: Madame Chiang Kai-shek – Meiling – with her sisters Ailing and Qingling in 1942 in Chungking. Photograph: AP Soong Ei-ling (Big Sister), the eldest of the children, was “the first Chinese woman to be educated in the United States.” She married an American-educated Christian banker named H. H. Kung. She guided him to an enormous fortune, much of it gained during the war with Japan when Kung served as finance minister and sometime prime minister in the Nationalist government. In fact, it was Ei-ling who was her brother-in-law Chiang Kai-shek’s most influential advisor, even though much of her advice had to be funneled through her husband or a younger brother who also served in Chiang’s cabinet. With these health warnings in place: where it really succeeds for me is with the framing of the narrative by the lifetime of the three sisters. With Mei-ling being the last to pass away in 2003, it moves beyond the stopping points of traditional histories. For Chinese history this can often mean 1949 when the communists took power. But Chang diverts us to Taiwan where Mei-ling lived with Chiang Kai-shek and gives us an insight into another 50 years of fascinating changes that are very relevant to the headlines today.

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, written in a compulsive style that sweeps the story along, is much the fullest account of their remarkable lives available in English… The sisters make a great story told with considerable sympathy for them... The warts-and-all portrait of "the Father of the Republic" is a welcome corrective to

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Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a gripping story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal, which takes us on a sweeping journey from Canton to Hawaii to New York, from exiles’ quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. In a group biography that is by turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China.