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

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I suppose that's a matter of personal taste. Seagrave offers a more negative take on the Soong family while Chang is in turns neutral or complimentary. Chang also grew up in China during Mao's regime while Seagrave was a foreigner. Chang's book is also shorter and her writing style may appeal more to certain readers than others. So ultimately, I think both books have their good/bad sides. It’s certainly far from hyperbolic to say that these three women shaped China; that, without them, China today would not be the nation we know today. Three sisters, daughters of a Christian preacher, grew up to become the wives and advisors of China’s most powerful men, affecting their moves and decisions and helping carve out a new China. Their stories are incredible, almost beyond belief. And the way that Jung Chang tells them is masterful, to say the least. Huge, huge power. My father loved writing and encouraged us to write diaries. But I had to destroy my diary during the revolution. There was a strong bond between the sisters, who were alone together getting an education at Wellesley College. But eventually they were divided by politics because Ching-ling sided with the Communists and the other two were involved with the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang).

The three sisters’s father, Soong Charlie, grew up poor but gained the advantage of a missionary education. Trained as a missionary himself in the United States, he found ways for all six of his children to gain American college degrees. They all became fluent English speakers.

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. Seagrave published the Soong Dynasty in 1985, and while that book is longer and has more material, Jung Chang published this in 2019, with some information that Seagrave did not have access to. So which book is better? 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

Charlie Soong being very forward thinking sent each of his daughters to an American boarding school at a young age. He made influential friends who were then introduced to his daughters. The sisters were very intelligent and interested in the politics of their country. They also believed that women should be man’s equal and the three sisters all rose to positions of influence. Her breathtaking new triple biography restores these “tiger-willed” women to their extraordinarily complex humanity. I was constantly reminded of the Mitford sisters as I read of their witty, affectionate sibling bonds, glamorous lives, fiercely opposed political ideologies and privileged detachment from the street-level impact of those beliefs.The subject of an earlier biography by Jung Chang, the Dowager Empress was in reality a far worthier person than she is generally portrayed as being. “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.” After earl So Sun Yat-sen the aforementioned “father” of modern China, and Chiang Kai-shek the nationalist leader / dictator get at least as much if not more attention. Jung Chang divides the book into five parts spanning the years 1866 – 2003. It features the rise of Sun Yat-Sen and the overthrow of the Chinese monarchy to May-Ling’s marriage to Chiang Kai-Shek.