Jung Chang, Chinese-British writer best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, delivered the University's 2012 Baggs Memorial Lecture on Tuesday 13 March. Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a 'barefoot' doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1982 - the first person from Communist China to recieve a doctorate from a British university.
Transcript available on request - please email internalcomms@contacts.bham.ac.uk