Life & Wisdom Quote by Jung Chang

Cruelty is doing the heavy lifting here: not as an aberration produced by chaos, but as a social operating system. Jung Chang isn’t tallying body counts; she’s arguing about habit. By framing cruelty as a distinguishing “mark” of Chinese society, she shifts attention from the headline events of modern Chinese history - revolutions, wars, campaigns - to the everyday permissions that let those events metastasize. The provocation is moral and diagnostic at once: the problem isn’t just a bad regime or a bad decade, it’s a cultural tolerance for coercion that survives regime change.

The line “reject it totally” has the ring of an exorcism, and that’s the intent. Chang writes as someone shaped by the Mao era and its long shadow; her work often treats political violence as something learned, normalized, and then reproduced in families, workplaces, and institutions. The subtext is that upheaval doesn’t invent brutality, it reveals what’s already been cultivated: denunciation, public shaming, the calculus of survival that turns neighbors into informants. “Another upheaval” is a warning to reformers and romantics who imagine revolution as cleansing. Chang’s cynicism is aimed at the story people like to tell themselves: that if you swap the ideology, you automatically get a kinder society.

It’s also a deliberately totalizing claim - “Chinese society” as a unit - which is why it stings. Chang is staking a position against nationalist mythmaking and against the comforting idea that cruelty is always imported, exceptional, or temporary. Her wager is that without an explicit, shared refusal of cruelty as a tool, history will keep finding new costumes for the same old violence.