Jung Chang (Guy Aitchison/Wikimedia Commons)

The writer Jung Chang cut a petite and stylish figure at the Purcell Room in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Tuesday night. Her hair piled atop her head in an elegantly messy bun, she spoke eloquently to a packed audience of the experiences of writing Wild Swans and Mao: The Unknown Story, and growing up in a China in the grip of tyranny.

Wild Swans, prompted by sixty hours of taped interviews with her mother, quickly became a publishing phenomenon. At the time of its publication, however, she had no idea about how it would be received. Her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, assured her it was a great book, “And I trust his judgement,” she said, to much laughter.

Since its first publication in 1991, Wild Swans has sold some 10 million copies and been translated into 30 languages (although it is still banned in China). It is the most successful non-fiction book in British publishing history. I first read it some years ago, and remember being equal parts enthralled and horrified. Jung Chang’s account of life in twentieth century China reads like something from another, terrifying, planet. The book has been adapted into a play which is currently running at the Young Vic (from 13 April to 13 May 2012).

The book, as you probably know, details the life of her mother and grandmother, along with her own experiences as, initially, the pampered child of the elite and later the daughter of a family in disgrace. Her family’s story is, in many respects, China’s story. Her grandmother was the concubine to a warlord, her mother a recruit to the Communist underground at the age of fifteen, her father rising to a position of some power in the Communist party. But the family’s service did not help them when Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, which saw them denounced.

She spoke of Mao’s cult of personality, and how programmed everyone was to worship him. She was as caught up in it as a youngster as everyone else, and it took years to throw off such conditioning. She went from, briefly, being a Red Guard in 1966, to lowering her head and pretending to sob when Mao’s death was announced in 1976, an experience she was reminded of when watching the scenes of mass grief from North Korea when Kim Jong-Il died last December.

“The power of brainwashing can never be underestimated,” she said.

Her following book, Mao: The Unknown Story, co-written with her husband, was the product of twelve years of research and excited some controversy on its publication in 2005. “If it weren’t controversial, I would have regarded it as a monumental failure,” she told the audience.

She recounted the ups and downs of their research, from her husband scouring the Russian archives during a brief window of openness to cornering President Mobuto of Zaire in a hair salon in a hotel in Hong Kong.

Today’s China has changed almost unrecognisably from the poverty-stricken, regimented, scary country of Jung Chang’s youth, but she admitted to a certain pessimism about the future. The country has grown more aggressive in recent years, and she wondered whether the leadership have brought into their own propaganda about China’s strength, envisioning a China that is stronger than it actually is.

On a lighter note, I was excited to learn of her latest project, a biography of the Dowager Empress Cixi, who began her ascent to power as an imperial concubine, which should be published next year. China doesn’t lack for larger than life characters.