My mother died without me because of Beijing’s threats

Writing truthfully about the oppressive regime in China has been devastating for the author of ‘Wild Swans’, Jung Chang, who could not be with her mother when she died 11 days ago

- Jung Chang

My mother, Xia De-hong, died in Chengdu, China, on 15 April 2026, aged 94. I was unable to be with her at her deathbed. The books I had written, including Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China and especially Mao: The Unknown Story, had mortally offended the Beijing regime.

The perils of writing those books that declined to toe the party line were known to my mother and me. But she never asked me to steer away from danger, or to pull my punches. She wanted me to write freely and truthfully. When I agonised about the troubles my books might bring her, who lived in China, she invariably reassured me, and told me to banish all concerns.

My mother was nothing if not brave. When I was a child, I witnessed her courage in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). She was under tremendous pressure to disown my father, who was speaking up against Mao’s violent purge, and was, as a result, arrested, tortured, sent to a camp, and eventually died of abuse. Although my mother had argued with him against what he did, calling it “pointless” and “suicidal”, she admired him and loved him and stood by him. The price she paid was years of detention, hard labour and horrific “denunciations meetings”, at one of which she was forced to kneel on broken glass. I remember well helping my grandma pick out the sharp fragments from her knees.