Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

These two concepts run parallel throughout the book. They represent a perplexing question confronting students of totalitarian regimes such as Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China: to what extent are the regimes’ horrors attributable to the megalomaniacal dictator, and to what extent does the blame fall on ordinary people?

There is no doubt that Mao Zedong carefully and deliberately cultivated a godlike image of himself to advance his power. High-level officials such as Chang’s parents might have believed that they were offering their submission to the Party and not to any one individual but, for more than a quarter-century, the Party’s authority was indistinguishable from Mao’s. When the Party demanded complete submission, it was well understood that the demand came from Mao. Chang’s father saw this first-hand at Yan’an in 1942 and again in 1957, when he warned his wife that Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign was an act of deception designed to draw “snakes out of their lairs,” i.e., uncover closet rightists (209). Chang’s parents saw this again during the Great Leap Forward with its frenzy of irrational pronouncements and political theater with no other purpose than pleasing Mao.

The Cult of Mao, however, assumed gargantuan proportions during the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and plagued China for nearly a decade. To prepare the way for this catastrophic upheaval, Mao began with the schools. Starting in 1964, China’s schoolchildren, including Chang and her siblings, were fed a steady diet of Maoist indoctrination. They learned to hate “class enemies” (258) and to revere Mao above all. Even her father told Chang that she must “obey Chairman Mao” (265). One day, Mao decided that having a lawn or a garden constituted a “bourgeois habit,” so children left their classrooms, went outside, and began pulling grass out of the ground (272). Then, in 1966, Mao unleashed millions of Red Guards—young people in their teens and twenties who had been taught unqualified devotion to Mao—upon a terrified public. Everything old, suspicious, or unconnected to Mao was smashed. Chang joined several friends in a pilgrimage to Peking, but when she failed to catch more than a fleeting glimpse of Mao, she briefly contemplated suicide.

Every atrocity committed in Mao’s name, however, was carried out by someone other than Mao. Reflecting on her childhood in Jinzhou, Chang’s mother recalled that the “Manchukuo police were less of a threat than ordinary civilians” (54). This truth also would apply to Mao’s China. Mao knew how to provoke people’s resentment against enemies real or imagined, but he alone could not turn the resentment into action. As early as 1950, for instance, Chang says that the Party’s “thought examination” meetings came to be “dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration” (157). Indeed, in the annals of despotism, Mao’s great “invention” was to “involve the entire population in the machinery of control” (178). During the Cultural Revolution, civilians made countless false reports to Red Guards for the sole purpose of settling an old score. Chang says that when Mao told people to “seize power,” this “did not mean influence over policies—it meant license over people” (334). Ordinary civilians carried out the Cultural Revolution’s violence. Mao did not need the army because “the whole of China was like a prison” (341). Reflecting on the cruelty her father experienced during his ordeal and consequent prolonged struggle with mental illness, Chang asked: “What had turned people into monsters” (362)? One suspects that many of them already were.