In fact, writing was taken so seriously that most of the violent purges engineered by the Chinese Communist Party’s demigod leader, Mao Zedong—including the Cultural Revolution—began with an attack on some article or play or piece of literary criticism on the grounds of its alleged bourgeois or anti-Mao characteristics. There would be an opening salvo written by a Maoist acolyte, after which everybody who was anybody in China would line up in an Orwellian exercise of ritual denunciation of the isolated and defenseless writer. From there, the campaign would expand to claim hundreds of thousands of victims. “No parents would tell their child, ‘Become a writer,’” Chang said.

Of course, Chang did become a writer, leaving China to study in Britain in 1978, and over time a celebrated chronicler of the modern Chinese experience in the English language, one of the first from China itself to overturn some of the romantic-revolutionary conceptions of Mao and his era that had a remarkably long life in the West. Her first book, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China—a memoir of her grandmother, her mother, and herself living through China’s tragically turbulent 20th century—sold 10 million copies and was probably the most widely read personal account ever to come directly out of the belly of the Chinese beast. She followed that up 12 years later with a contentious, blistering, 800-page treatment of Mao himself, co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday; then came an eye-opening revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, a sinister villain in the eyes of most previous historians, a progressive feminist hero to Chang.

Yet one thing is unchanged from Chang’s younger years: Writing about China remains a dangerous occupation—dangerous of course to China’s citizens, but now even to foreigners who challenge the official doctrine. Witness the storm of protest from China, the threats and the economic penalties imposed on the National Basketball Association over a single tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, who briefly wrote of (and hastily deleted) his support for pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. China’s ruling authority has a very thin skin. Inside the country, the danger of writing leads to pervasive self-censorship, and more and more that appears to apply to those outside the country, too.

Of course, even at the time when Wild Swans appeared, Chang was not alone in opening Western eyes to the full horror of the Maoist era. When we spoke, she was quick to give credit to Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, an unforgettable account of survival in the Cultural Revolution, as an earlier example of such works. Subsequently there have been other books—Wu Ningkun’s A Single Tear and the physicist Fang Lizhi’s The Most Wanted Man in China among the most affecting of them. But while she hasn’t had the field to herself for a long time, Chang occupies a special position, not only because Wild Swans, with its historical, multigenerational sweep and its sheer narrative power, is a true masterpiece, but also because she has moved on from memoirist to what might be called a polemical historian.

Chang could have followed what some might have expected to be her natural trajectory—becoming a kind of Chinese Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a public critic of China’s cruelly authoritarian, one-party system. Her more recent works, including Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, out October 29, instead take a different approach.

“I like the distance that only history provides,” she said. “History is no less devastating.” She meant devastating in the effect that an honest attempt at recounting the past can have on the sanctioned Chinese version of the past. In China, that is the heroic chronicle according to which the Communist Party rescued the country from the scourges of imperialism, poverty, and oppression. A few years ago, in a proclamation known as “Document Number Nine,” the party’s central committee warned against what it said were wrong ideological tendencies, among them “historical nihilism,” meaning history that undermines the official account of the past. “History is one of the biggest taboos in China today,” Chang told me. “It’s not some harmless, apolitical thing.” In this sense, Chang is one of the world’s leading historical nihilists.

The new book fits into the period between Cixi and Mao, and seeks to understand how China went from the promising days after the fall of the last dynasty to the Maoist wreckage. And while it is probably Chang’s least edgy, least contentious work, it is still stamped by her revisionist impulse.

Cixi was the most powerful person in China for most of the second half of the 19th century and has been regarded by most historians as a usurping, reactionary tyrant, but Chang portrayed her as a pioneering reformer, “the modernizer who brought China out of the medieval world,” as she put it to me. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Chang argued that it was Cixi who had fostered the freedom that China experienced in the couple of decades after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. “She was the first to ban foot binding, which had tormented my grandmother and Chinese women for a thousand years,” Chang said. “In school in China we learned that it was the Communist Party that did that.” Her and Halliday’s biography of Mao was criticized by some historians for always putting forth the worst possible interpretation of things. Still, informed by some 200 interviews with people who knew Mao, the book made a powerful case for the authors’ withering judgment of a man still admired in parts of the world as a revolutionary genius. In Chang and Halliday’s view, Mao belonged with Hitler and Stalin as one of the most destructive and hateful figures of 20th-century history.

“When I’m there, I’m in a cocoon,” she told me of her trips to China. “I can have no contact beyond my immediate family.” She spoke of her dread that even this “privilege” will one day be revoked, of the anxiety she experienced living apart from her mother, of the sadness she felt for being treated as what she called a “nonperson” in her home country. “But,” she said, “I realize this is the price I pay for writing honestly.”