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

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I found myself wanting to get back to the story about the sisters instead of the minutiae of the rise to power of this leader and the fall from grace of that leader. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister , written in a compulsive style that sweeps the story along, is much the fullest account of their remarkable lives available in English… The sisters make a great story told with considerable sympathy for them . Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the ‘Father of China’, Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao’s vice-chair. Tre sorelle molto diverse tra di loro, ma che grazie alla loro perseveranza, coraggio hanno reso ancora più grande il popolo cinese. He also was ready to agree with Soviet’s policy to make Manchuria, Mongolia, the Muslim area and Tibet all parts of the Soviet Union if they back him.

It features the rise of Sun Yat-Sen and the overthrow of the Chinese monarchy to May-Ling’s marriage to Chiang Kai-Shek. If their passions had not materialized into men that echoed their own convictions, would they have remained as they were? In a group biography that is by turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China. He was said to be raising money in Hawaii and elsewhere but what funds he got for this seem to come from his Maui based brother. 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.This led to at least one near-death experience, when Qingling was trapped in a military attack by one of Sun’s rivals. Outside the Bund, the waterfront, under the still gaze of the skyscrapers, numerous sampans rocked with the waves, offering a stirring sight of the city's vitality.

The author crafts the extraordinary story through writings of many people who knew them at the time. The writing style helps readers who are not used to reading biographies understand the context of the book easily.This was in part attributable to the malevolent and destabilising influence that Stalin's Soviet Union exerted. Charlie Soong, the father of the three sisters has a side of him that is Methodist preacher, and the other, a calculating businessman. Now she tells the extraordinary story of three sisters who due to marriage and family association found themselves at the centre of the tumultuous events that engulfed 20th century China. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

Somewhere in these pages there is a good biography, if the book was re-focussed and irrelevant facts, details and chapters were trimmed off. They protected each other from the political whims of their husbands and showered each other with gifts and letters.Sun created his own bank for China but under his name, and listed all its assets in his papers under ‘family affairs’. The only reservation I have about the book is related to the narrator's lack of knowledge of anything Chinese that renders person and place names almost impossible to identify without checking the text when listening to the audio version. After earlier efforts at reform that are generally credited to the men in her court, she doubled down on the effort after the turn of the century. Her books have been translated into over 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies outside Mainland China, where they are banned. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.