She is best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China.

As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father became successful as a propagandist at a regional level.

The Communist Party provided her family with a dwelling in a guarded, walled compound, a maid and chauffeur, as well as a wet-nurse and nanny for Chang and her four siblings.

[4] In her memoirs, Chang states that she refused to participate in the attacks on her teachers and other Chinese, and she left after a short period as she found the Red Guards too violent.

Her parents were publicly humiliated – ink was poured over their heads, they were forced to wear placards denouncing them around their necks, kneel in gravel and to stand outside in the rain – followed by imprisonment, her father's treatment leading to lasting physical and mental illness.

Chang was able to leave China and study in the UK on a Chinese government scholarship in 1978, a year before the post-Mao Reforms began.

After Mao's death, she passed an exam which allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was politically rehabilitated.

Having lived in China during the 1960s and 1970s, she found Britain exciting and loved the country, especially its diverse range of culture, literature and arts.

[8] Chang lives in west London with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, who specializes in history of Asia.

Chang became a popular figure for talks about Communist China; and she has travelled across Britain, Europe, America, and many other places in the world.

[9] The BBC invited her onto the panel of Question Time for a first-ever broadcast from Shanghai on 10 March 2005,[10] but she was unable to attend when she broke her leg a few days beforehand.

Chang was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to literature and history.

[12] They interviewed hundreds of people who had known Mao, including George H. W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama.

"[14] Among their criticisms of Mao, Chang and Halliday argue that despite his having been born into a relatively rich peasant family, he had little well-informed concern for the long-term welfare of the Chinese peasantry.

They also write that Mao had arranged for the arrests and murders of many of his political opponents, including some of his personal friends, and they argue that he was a far more tyrannical leader than had previously been thought.

[18] The Sydney Morning Herald reported that while few commentators disputed it, "some of the world's most eminent scholars of modern Chinese history" had referred to the book as "a gross distortion of the records.

Te-Ping Chen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, found the book "packed with details that bring to life its central character.

But rewriting Cixi as Catherine the Great or Margaret Thatcher is a poor bargain: the gain of an illusory icon at the expense of historical sense.