Chiang Kai-shek is one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, where he was lionized by the China Lobby advanced by TIME Magazine publisher Henry Luce. The three women were sisters, the daughters of Soong Charlie, who rose from poverty to become a prominent business owner and supporter of a republic for China, and his devout Christian wife. Then what is a book on Chinese history might become what it promised to be: a biography of three most powerful Chinese women and their roles in shaping 20th century China. Sun before him, he partnered with Shanghai’s notorious Green Gang; although Chiang was trained in the Soviet Union and controlled by Stalin for several years, he put the gangsters to work murdering Communists once he broke publicly with the Party in 1928. Jung Chang is the internationally bestselling author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China; Mao: The Unknown Story (with Jon Halliday); and Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine who Launched Modern China.

Somewhere in these pages there is a good biography, if the book was re-focussed and irrelevant facts, details and chapters were trimmed off. Una bellissima fiaba cinese moderna, come è descritta nell'introduzione all'opera che spiega la bellezza di questo paese, la sua storia, il suo fascino. Indeed, if the Soong sisters had not actually existed, the story of their operatic lives, had it been conjured in fiction, would surely have been branded by censors as salacious spiritual pollution.This led to at least one near-death experience, when Qingling was trapped in a military attack by one of Sun’s rivals. Przez wiele stuleci w Chinach utrzymywany był kult jednostki, a co najważniejsze dla tej historii – że władzę może wyrwać sobie każdy, kto będzie wystarczająco zdeterminowany i bezwzględny. In an attempt to emulate the selflessness of Joan of Arc, Ching-ling ended up devoting herself to a man unworthy of her worship. Despite supporting CCP, she even after their victory still lived in a mansion with servants – far from ordinary Chinese and far from equality formally backed by her. Ei-ling has the only children of the 3 sisters: two sons and a daughter, who served the family in various capacities and Louis, a paranoid TX oilman who married an American actress and produced the sole heir to the Kung-Soong wealth, now in his 70's with no children.

Their unions would influence the history of the world, yet all I could recite was the fairytale-like adage, “One loved money, one loved power, one loved her country. He was ready to give Manchuria to Japan twice: once asking for their backing against the Manchu dynasty and then to fight against the republic. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book which accounts the lives of the three Soong sisters who each had large influence over the formation of modern China. 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.

That book, which “portrayed the Soong family in a highly unfavourable light,” shaped my views of some of the major figures in twentieth-century Chinese history, including Dowager Empress Cixi, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who pioneered the idea that China should become a republic, became angry when he was not elected as the republic's first president.