Insight with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, co-author of Mao: The Untold Story - £10 June 27, 2006

“Ever since the spectacular success of Chang’s Wild Swans we have waited impatiently for her to complete with her husband this monumental study of China’s most notorious modern leader. The expectation has been that she would rewrite modern Chinese history. The wait has been worthwhile and the expectation justified. This is a bombshell of a book.”

– Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, in The Times (London)

Based on a decade of research and on interviews with many of Mao’s close circle, Chang and Halliday’s book offers a harrowing portrait of the Chairman’s ruthless accumulation of power through the exercise of terror. It is an entirely fresh - and controversial - look at Mao.

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She 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, where she became the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university.

Her award-winning book, Wild Swans, was published in 1991. Neither it nor Mao has been published in China.

Jon Halliday is a Russian historian and the author of eight books, including a biography of Douglas Sirk.

Join us, as Jung Chang and Jon Halliday speak about the decade they dedicated to the research and writing of this monumental political biography, and the year since its publication.

Please RSVP to [email protected]

Official Website: http://www.frontlineclub.com