Jung Chang

(China, 1952) became world-famous with Wild Swans, which sold more than ten million copies. It tells the history of China from the perspective of her own, her mother's, and her grandmother's lives. Chang became an international celebrity but her book was banned in China. As a child of senior party cadres she enjoyed many priviledges, but her family lost everything when her parents came into conflict with Mao. They were rehabilitated after his death, and Chang became the first Chinese person to earn a PhD in England. After writing Wild Swans, she spent more than a decade working with her husband, Irish historian Jon Halliday, on a bulky biography of Mao Zedong. In 2013 she published The Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched modern China. It portrays the often-criticized Cixi, who ruled China from 1861-1908, as a smart proto-feminist who guided China into the modern world but was curtailed by the conservative imperial bureaucracy.