Quotes from Jung Chang

I feel perhaps my heart is still in China.

I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.

If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else.

The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two faces of the same coin: one was the cult of personality; the other, its essential corollary, was the cult of impersonality

My joy at the sensation of my mind opening up and expanding was beyond description.

According to tradition, my great-grandfather married early, at 14, with a woman six years older. It was considered to be one of the duties of the wife to raise her husband.

The Chinese language is extremely hard to learn. It is the only major linguistic system in the world that does not have an alphabet; and it is composed of numerous complicated characters – ideograms – which have to be memorised one by one and, moreover, are totally unrelated to sounds.

Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying thank you too often, which was branded as bourgeois hypocrisy; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.

By tradition, a teacher was a most revered figure, a mentor for life, who imparted wisdom as well as knowledge, and who must be respected like a parent. (The murder of a teacher was classified as parricide, which, like treason, was punishable by death of a thousand cuts.) Emperors and princes set up shrines in their homes to honour their deceased tutors.

They were endowed with the qualities of youth- they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a 'just cause', thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant, and easy to manipulate- and prone to violence. Only they could give Mao the immense force that he needed to terrorize the society.

One piece of information that made an impression on her was that individual Chinese lives mattered to the Westerners.

not his mother, nor did he hesitate to say so.

Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being too attached to her family, which was condemned as a bourgeois habit, and had to see less and less of her own mother.

increasingly weak. Then, half a century after Lord Macartney's failed mission, the closed door was pushed ajar by Britain through the Opium

Mao's rule was best understood in terms of a medieval court, in which he exercised spellbinding power over his courtiers and subjects. He was also a maestro at 'divide and rule', and at manipulating men's inclination to throw others to the wolves.

Making a lot of noise was considered essential for a good wedding, as keeping quiet would have been seen as suggesting that there was something shameful about the event.

So the story of Wild Fox Kang's attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot.

We in China had been trained not to draw conclusions from facts, but to start with Marxist theories or Mao thoughts or the Party line and to deny, even condemn, the facts that did not suit them. I

Few of her achievements have been recognised, and when they are, the credit is invariably given to the men serving her. This is largely due to a basic handicap: that she was a woman and could only rule in the name of her sons ... In terms of groundbreaking achievements, political sincerity and personal courage, Empress Dowager Cixi set a standard that has barely been matched.

Traditional Chinese administration was a well-oiled machine, which, barring a crisis, would keep ticking over. Initiatives were not required and rarely offered. State policies depended almost entirely on the dynamism of the throne.

I wanted to look calm, and to let them know that they could not demoralize us. I had no fear or sense of humiliation, only contempt for them. What had turned people into monsters? What

It was not so much a feeling of being insulted, but an overwhelming pain for the people of my native land. We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves. I thought of the old observation that Chinese lives were cheap, and one Englishman's amazement that his Chinese servant should find a toothache unbearable.

MAO TSE-TUNG, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.

Like many Chinese, I was incapable of rational thinking in those days. We were so cowed and contorted by fear and indoctrination that to deviate from the path laid down by Mao would have been inconceivable. Besides, we had been overwhelmed by deceptive rhetoric, disinformation, and hypocrisy, which made it virtually impossible to see through the situation and to form an intelligent judgment.