After the great success of Wild Swans in 1991, in which the author recounted the lives of three generations of women, beginning with her grandmother and ending with Mao’s death, she returned with this new book, a continuation of the previous one, in which she relies above all on her admiration for her mother to provide a very realistic view of Chinese communism.
Taking advantage of a period of greater openness, she left her country and earned a doctorate in Philology in Great Britain, where she married and became a British citizen. The book recalls the criminal Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, which destroyed her father, an honest communist, and the subsequent rise of Deng Xiaoping, who launched China’s economic takeoff through certain liberalizing measures without relinquishing the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party, up to the arrival of Xi Jinping.
Together with her husband, Jon Halliday, she wrote a landmark biography of the Chinese dictator and recounts how that work was undertaken, as well as their travels throughout China gathering first-hand information and unique data that place the “Great Helmsman” in his proper perspective—a propagandistic myth that, as so often happens in politics, leaves behind misery and terror.
The book is engaging and informative for understanding the daily realities of a communist country that seeks to become a world power, with a controlled and subjugated population, while exercising a formidable form of global capitalism.