Speaker Details

Jung Chang’s book "Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China" has been translated into 30 languages and has sold over 9 million copies world-wide, reaching no. 1 in over a dozen countries, including Japan, Britain, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia.

"Wild Swans" has won many awards, including the NCR Book Award UK (1992), UK Writers' Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book of the Year UK (1993). It is probably the most widely read book about China this century.

Born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China in 1952, Jung Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a ‘barefoot’ doctor, a steelworker and an electrician before becoming an English Language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University.

She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 - the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British University. She has since also been awarded honorary doctorates from universities of Buckingham, York and Warwick and the Open University. Dr. Chang currently is working on a biography of Mao Zedong.

Her spellbinding lectures charting the dramatic developments in 20th century China, provide a truly unique, inspiring and uplifting experience and help to understand the challenge of 21st Century globalisation.