Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of York in 1982. She is the first person from the People�s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She lives in London with her husband, Jon Halliday, with whom she wrote Mao: The Unknown Story. Her non-fiction book, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, was a New York Times bestseller in 2014.