4 ideas
Chang's father, Wang Yu, was so rigidly principled that in 1949, on the long trek to Sichuan, he refused to let his pregnant wife ride in his official vehicle because it would be privilege, and she miscarried. He was denounced, detained and tortured into mental breakdown, and died in 1975, destroyed by the system whose ideals he had followed most literally.
During the Great Leap Forward, local cadres who reported realistic harvests were punished as rightists, so they inflated their figures to survive. The state then requisitioned grain based on those fictional numbers, leaving peasants with nothing, and tens of millions starved.
Mao's regime did not rely mainly on police. It made every person a monitor of everyone else through compulsory self-criticism, thought-reform meetings and rewards for denunciation. Loyalty to the Party was required to override loyalty to spouse, parents and children, so the family, the last private refuge, became another instrument of surveillance.
Across three generations the specific constraint on women changes: bound feet and concubinage for the grandmother, Party discipline that subordinated the mother's body and marriage to the revolution, then Red Guard conformity and rustication for the daughter. The lens is to ask not whether a regime liberated women from the old controls, but which new controls replaced them and who now holds them.