Getting close to in this case means giving the dirty laundry a good airing. Sun Yat-sen, the bad father of China They were the most famous sisters in China. 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. Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the ‘Father of China’, Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao’s vice-chair. Little Sister, May-ling, became Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China and a major political figure in her own right. Big Sister, Ei-ling, became Chiang’s unofficial main adviser – and made herself one of China’s richest women. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a gripping story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal, which takes us on a sweeping journey from Canton to Hawaii to New York, from exiles’ quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. 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. Written in biographical style the book explains all of the key historical events as the outcome of personal decisions.

May-ling preferred the gossip and glamour of Shanghai social life to politics or business, but Ei-ling convinced her to marry Chiang Kai-shek, the dour Generalissimo. In 1928, Chiang became president of the right-wing military regime, with Ei-ling’s husband serving as a government minister. In 1942, charming, English-speaking May-ling was instrumental in winning international support for her husband Chiang’s nationalist government, although flight from his enemies also caused her to miscarry. Meanwhile Ei-ling and her husband profited from “colossally corrupt” sales to the regime both before and during the Second World War, eventually causing President Truman to denounce them as “thieves”. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang, was a sweeping and gripping account of the Soong family of Shanghai, not only of these three sisters that played a large part in the shaping of the history of China in the twentieth century, but it also tells about their three brothers, each making history in their own right, as part of the inner circle of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Jung Chang was born in China in 1952 and came to Britain in 1978. She is the author of Wild Swans, Mao: The Unknown Story (with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday) and Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15m copies outside mainland China, where they are banned. Her latest, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China, charts the lives of the Soong sisters, who were among the most significant political figures of early 20th-century China. This is partly because the sisters lives are so bound up with these two towering figures, but also because Jung Chang portrays history as a fundamentally personal process and so wants to get as close as possible to the people who “made history”: what were the motives for their decisions and how did their personalities affect the course of events. Absorbing . . . In this lucid, wise, forgiving biography Chang gives a new twist to an old line. Behind every great man . . . is a Soong sister.” — The Times (UK)By necessity the story is not only about the three sisters. It is as well about the “programme-setters and history-changers” that the author has also researched thoroughly over the last few years. The lives, deeds, and triumphs of these three sisters are nothing less than phenomenal. And the fact that I – and likely countless others – had never even known of their existence is a crying shame. But Jung Chang is here to fix that. Through Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister she has proven the importance and consequence of women in revolutionary China. I’m not normally a great fan of non-fiction, especially political tales, however this riveting biography is so well written it at no time becomes weighed down. The three sisters, their lives and loves, make for some fascinating reading. Moving from grand parties in Shanghai to penthouses in New York, from exiles’ quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meetings in Moscow we read about power struggles, godfather style assassinations, secret talks and bribes making this a book that is compulsive reading. Chang strides over a century of world-shaking events with all her storytelling flair and fluent command of original sources . . . [ An] epic tale.” ( i)

An enjoyable take on China’s turbulent 20th-century history, seen through the revealing perspective of three women at the centre of power Andrea Janku, BBC History The Soong sisters were an extraordinary trio… Jung Chang has shown, in books such as Wild Swans, her instinct for a compelling story, and that instinct stands her in good stead here as she weaves her way through the complex history of China … Well worth reading…” (Rana Mitter Sunday Times) A story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal. Asian Art Newspaper, *Books of the Year* Her breathtaking new triple biography restores these “tiger-willed” women to their extraordinarily complex humanity. I was constantly reminded of the Mitford sisters as I read of their witty, affectionate sibling bonds, glamorous lives, fiercely opposed political ideologies and privileged detachment from the street-level impact of those beliefs.If Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister were fiction, it would be criticized as farfetched. The attraction of the Soong sisters’ story is their completely implausible connections to just about everyone of celebrity or importance in modern China. The three husbands of the Soong sisters are there, of course – Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kaishek, and KMT finance minister HH Kung – but also Mao, Zhou Enlai, Eleanor Roosevelt, and even Elvis Presley makes an appearance. In almost every scene of China’s recent history, the Soong sisters appear. To say more would turn this review into a summary of the entire book but it’s hard to resist when its narrative proved to be so utterly compelling, even down to the few brief mentions of Mao as he existed in the shadows during the days of power of Sun and Chiang Kai-shek. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Three daughters of Charlie Soong are introduced and their lives and impacts on society skillfully unfolded for a neophyte reader on this topic. Author Jung Chang does a clear and compelling job at showing how their parents' and their childhood in various places informed life choices, while keeping the threads of family bonds in place no matter how far they traveled. 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 Ei-ling, Big Sister, was the eldest daughter of Charlie Soong; a fiercely strategic, sharp, ambitious, and intelligent woman who rose to become an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek – an advisor with so much strength that she could have accurately been called his puppet master.

The main subjects of this intensely engaging historical biography are the three daughters of Charlie Soong: Ei-ling, Ching-ling, and May-ling. These three women left as great a mark on, and were as influential in the transformation of, China as any of China’s more famous male leaders (all of whom also play a key role in this book), and here Jung Chang brings them into the historical limelight where they belong.

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This is a magnificent biography of the three Soong sisters, Ei-ling, Ching-ling, and May-ling. Each of the girls were sent, as young children, to be educated in the United States. Ei-Ling, known as "Big Sister," married H.H. Kung, a business man, and ultimately became the wealthiest woman in China. Ching-ling, known as "Red Sister," married the "father of China," Sun Yat-sen, and ultimately rose to be Mao Zedung's Vice-Chair. May-ling, known as "Little Sister," became Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and first lady pre-Communist Nationalist China. This is an extraordinary and riveting account of the life stories of the Soong sisters and their involvement and influence in the sweep of the turbulent history in China during the twentieth century. The Song sisters—Qingling, Meiling and Ailing—on a visit with female nationalist soldiers in 1937.. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a monumental work, worthy both of Jung Chang’s Mao and of the great, rambling, heterogeneous Chinese folk epics of the oral past, such as The Water Margin and The Three Kingdoms. Its three fairy-tale heroines, poised between east and west, spanned three centuries, two continents and a revolution, with consequences that reverberate, perhaps now more than ever, in all our lives to this day. Hilary Spurling, Spectator