Happiness Quote by Jung Chang

Prosperity is supposed to buy legitimacy; Jung Chang points out the invoice is still unpaid. The line pivots on a deceptively simple contrast: “better lives” versus “not happy and confident.” Material uplift is acknowledged, even granted, but then immediately stripped of its usual political meaning. Chang’s intent is to puncture the regime’s preferred narrative that GDP growth equals national renewal. If the people are richer yet uneasy, something deeper is unresolved.

The subtext sits in that loaded phrase, “the scars.” Chang doesn’t name them, because she doesn’t have to. For readers attuned to her work and to modern Chinese history, “scars” evokes the Cultural Revolution’s betrayals, denunciations, family ruptures, and the long discipline of self-censorship that followed. Trauma here is both personal and structural: it lives in memory, and it also persists as an architecture of fear. “Happy” and “confident” aren’t private moods; they’re civic emotions. Confidence implies trust in institutions, in truth-telling, in the future. Chang suggests that without reckoning, prosperity becomes a kind of gloss coat over damaged wood.

Context matters because Chang writes as someone whose biography is entwined with the state’s violence, and whose audience includes outsiders tempted by the “China miracle” storyline. The sentence is calibrated to resist the West’s lazy trade-off: authoritarianism for development. It’s a reminder that a society can advance in comfort while remaining stalled in dignity.