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Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang - reviewBy Evening Standard

When Jung Chang was growing up in Mao’s China in the Fifties and Sixties, the three Soong sisters were like characters from a modern Chinese fairytale. “One loved money, one loved power, and one loved her country,” was the much-quoted saying.

Born in the final decades of the Manchu dynasty, these exceptional siblings, the subjects of Chang’s outstanding book, all exercised strong influence on 20th-century Chinese politics thanks to their extraordinary marriages.

Ei-ling — Big Sister, the lover of money — married H H Kung, one of China’s richest men and the holder of various high-ranking roles in the Nationalist government, including prime minister. May-ling — Little Sister, the lover of power — married Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Party and ruler of China between 1928 and 1949. And Ching-ling — Red Sister, the lover of her country — married Sun Yat-sen, the “Father of China” who began the revolution which eventually toppled the monarchy in 1911.

Their father was Soong Charlie, a Methodist convert and successful businessman who was a secret supporter of nascent Chinese republicanism and an early ally of Sun. He wanted his children to benefit from Western education and, thanks to his Methodist connections, all three sisters were granted places at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Ei-ling, as the eldest , was the first Chinese woman to be educated in the US.

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When Ei-ling returned to Shanghai, she worked as Sun’s English language assistant. He fell in love with her, but he was already married and Ei-ling, deeply religious, self-sufficient and proud, would not consider an affair or encourage divorce. Sun’s affections shifted to Ching-ling who, unlike her older sister, was rebellious. She idolised Sun, regarding him as the sole saviour for her country. They married in 1915; he was 48 and she was 21.

Her hero-worship did not last forever. In 1922, when Sun’s home was under siege from the Beijing government, he used Ching-ling as bait while he was smuggled away in secret. After two hellish days and nights, Ching-ling was so stressed and exhausted that she begged her guards to shoot her. She suffered a miscarriage from the ordeal and was unable to conceive again.

May-ling, in contrast, although very intelligent, was not, to begin with, as politically engaged as Red Sister or as religious as Big Sister. Instead, she opted for a life of high-society parties and strings of suitors. This changed in the winter of 1926/27 when she witnessed public lashings, illegal seizures, kangaroo courts and executions in the Red city of Wuhan. With encouragement from Ei-ling, who was passionately anti-Communist, she agreed to marry Generalissimo Chiang.

This appalled Ching-ling, who had become a committed Leninist and despised Chiang for his attempts to advance himself as Sun’s heir. She left China in self-imposed exile, first to Moscow and then Berlin. Determined to see the Chiang regime destroyed, even if it meant disaster for her family, she engaged in espionage, hiding a list of traitors’ names for the Soviets inside a cigarette. Incredibly, the bond between the sisters held firm in this period despite their political differences, even as civil war battles raged around them. May-ling admired the way Ching-ling “stood alone” against the world, while Ching-ling acknowledged that without her little sister Chiang “might have been much worse”. Even when Red Sister was doing her best to help Mao beat Chiang, she was still sending May-ling delicacies like freshwater prawns. The gesture was returned with ginger cake and cheese biscuits.

This bond didn’t survive once Mao took power in 1949. May-ling, who was placed on a list of “war criminals”, fled with Chiang to Taiwan while Ei-ling and H H Kung moved to New York. Ching-ling stopped replying to her sisters’ letters and embraced her symbolic role as Sun’s widow in Mao’s regime.

At first she turned a blind eye to the “anti-Rightist” campaigns in the Fifties, parroting the party slogan “We must crush warm-feeling-ism”, but the later atrocities of the Cultural Revolution became impossible to ignore. She lived in fear that the Red Guards would burst into her house and torture her for possessing “bourgeois” beautiful clothes, so she threw them into the stove. When she died in 1981, aged 88, she had long separated from her family. No Soongs, Chiangs or Kungs attended her funeral.

As with her previous books, most famously Wild Swans, it is Chang’s sympathetic, storyteller’s eye — her attention to deeply human detail during the most extraordinary circumstances — that makes her work remarkable. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is another triumph.

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang (Cape, £25), buy it here.