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Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China

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If you are interested in this topic it is a good place to start; for those who know the story of the Soong’s there is new information and perspective. Before wading into the sisters’ lives, she devotes detailed chapters to two men: Sun, who amassed power mostly by being a ruthless, thuggish blowhard; and Charlie Soong, the paterfamilias of the Soong clan, a former Methodist preacher turned wealthy businessman and underground revolutionary. Learning about the true history of thesr real people can be hard because we know they went through this. Jung Chang is the internationally bestselling author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China ; Mao: The Unknown Story (with Jon Halliday); and Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine who Launched Modern China .

Ik ben echt compleet in awe van dit boek en vind het ontzettend jammer dat ik dus eigenlijk tijdens de geschiedenislessen op de middelbare school bijna niks over de vorming van 'modern' China heb gehoord. Born in China, she lives in London with her husband, Jon Halliday, her coauthor on two of those books. Le signore di Shanghai" sono le tre sorelle Ei-ling, Ching-ling e May-ling, che hanno trasformato la Cina.

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If those unnecessary details were taken out, it would be a much compact and straight to the point kinda book. A former imperial concubine, this extraordinary woman had seized power through a palace coup after her husband’s death in 1861, whereupon she had begun to bring the medieval country into the modern age. Written in a very readable prose, this book captured the lives of the Soong sisters, Big sister, Red sister and Little sister, each of them making served their positions as women who help to shape China as it is. The three women were sisters, the daughters of Soong Charlie, who rose from poverty to become a prominent business owner and supporter of a republic for China, and his devout Christian wife. Taking the three sisters as the focal point is a clever way of exploring the twists and turns of Chinese society and politics as it moves from a monarchy through to communism.

All became drunk with the power that came with the men they manipulate (the slant given by Chang, although other accounts suggest that Sun and Chiang did what they did mainly on their own, with just some influence from the sisters).

But they had very fine skin, delicate features and graceful bearing, enhanced by fashionable clothes. Situated near the place where the Yangtze, the longest river in China, flows into the sea, it had been marshland only a few decades previously, before the Manchu government allowed Westerners to develop it. While Ailing went into business and Qingling became a political wife, the youngest of the sisters, Meiling, devoted herself to Shanghai high society. Among them, Marshall Wu Pei-Fu, a warlord (not all warlords were bad), and Mu-Zhen, Sun’s first and long-suffering wife.

As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the centre of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. They also believed that women should be man’s equal and the three sisters all rose to positions of influence. As President Harry S Truman famously said of the Soong and Kung families, “They’re all thieves, every damn one of them. There is some description of Chaing and his 2 million nationalists taking over the 7 million people of Taiwan and how his dictatorship was set up.

Another interesting detail, that ‘classic’ historic narrative about China in 1920s-30s stresses multiple local warlords, which split China. She may have never found out that her Japanese marriage was a fake, but she figured out that he used her as a decoy and risked her life. Photograph: Historic Collection/Alamy View image in fullscreen Qingling, Ailing and Meiling Song all played dominant roles in 20th-century Chinese life. Not that they were non-contentious - they were, but they needed each other if only to keep each other close and know who was doing what through all the societal changes that happened during their lifetimes. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Highlights of her life under Mao and her household, her alleged affair and her adopted daughters are page turners. To secure his release after a dozen years, Chiang agreed to a meeting with Zhou En-lai at which the two men cut a deal “which led to the two parties forming a ‘united front’ as equal partners when the war against Japan started, within months. Yes, provincial chiefs grew powerful and assertive, some of them took to arms to settle disputes with their neighbours but warlords all recognised the elected Beijing government. Big sister is Soong Ei-Ling (‘Big Sister’), Little Sister is May-Ling (‘Little Sister’), and Red Sister is Ching-Ling (‘Red Sister’). 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.

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