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

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The three women were sisters, the daughters of Soong Charlie, who rose from poverty to become a prominent business owner and supporter of a republic for China, and his devout Christian wife. While Ailing went into business and Qingling became a political wife, the youngest of the sisters, Meiling, devoted herself to Shanghai high society. Ching-ling, known as "Red Sister," married the "father of China," Sun Yat-sen, and ultimately rose to be Mao Zedung's Vice-Chair. The best-known modern Chinese ‘fairy tale’ is the story of three sisters from Shanghai, born in the last years of the nineteenth century. In the early 1920s, when Sun collaborated with the Soviet Politburo out of political convenience, it was Ching-ling who emerged the true believer and committed Leninist.

It features the rise of Sun Yat-Sen and the overthrow of the Chinese monarchy to May-Ling’s marriage to Chiang Kai-Shek. There is some description of Chaing and his 2 million nationalists taking over the 7 million people of Taiwan and how his dictatorship was set up. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history.The Dowager Empress emerges in Jung Chang’s book as a committed and effective reformer, not the greedy and self-indulgent figure portrayed in the Communists’s rewriting of history. All became drunk with the power that came with the men they manipulate (the slant given by Chang, although other accounts suggest that Sun and Chiang did what they did mainly on their own, with just some influence from the sisters). Ich jedyną nadzieją okazywały się kobiety, które potrafiły używać swojej siły wpływu do sterowania mężczyznami u władzy – i tutaj oto mamy możliwą przyczynę zbanowania tej książki w patriarchalnych Chinach. Born in China, she lives in London with her husband, Jon Halliday, her coauthor on two of those books. Gdyby jednak znał siłę samostanowienia i zaradność swoich córek i wiedział jak z fotela pasażera pokierują przemianami w Chinami, może nawet współczułby nieświadomemu mężczyźnie.

She makes such complicated moments in history so easy to understand and after reading this I feel like I’m a FOUNTAIN of knowledge on the politics of twentieth-century China. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for December 2023 - January 2024 at Non Fiction Book Club group. The author was pretty objective and neutral in conveying the historical narratives of these characters.I've already read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by the same author, and I've read about the Soong sisters in Sterling Seagrave's The Soong Dynasty so I decided to give this book a try. Thus, he was content to herd the Red Army into the arid far northwest where he might later bottle up and kill them. Jung Chang brings the early twentieth century to life as she explores the world of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-Shek. That book, which “portrayed the Soong family in a highly unfavourable light,” shaped my views of some of the major figures in twentieth-century Chinese history, including Dowager Empress Cixi, Dr.