Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China
JUNG CHANG
(Jonathan Cape, 400 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Lots of countries, it seems, have their own version of the Mitfords – posh ­sisters who veer off in all directions politically and whose savage ideological feuds are interesting mainly because they reflect much wider tensions in society. Among the Chinese, that role goes to the Soong sisters, though this being China, everything is on a grander scale than the Mitfords attempted; none of the three married below the rank of prime minister.

Born into great wealth in Shanghai to a family of Protestant converts, the sisters aimed high from the cradle onwards. Sister number two, Ching-ling (pictured), married Sun Yat-sen, first president of republican China after the fall the Manchu dynasty. After he died in 1925, she disappeared off to the Soviet Union, returned a dedicated Bolshevik and attached herself to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist rebels. After the Second World War ended, she swept into Beijing in 1949 on Mao’s coat-tails to help oversee the destruction of the society in which she had been raised.