Author Jung Chang, who once worshipped Mao, lost her faith in him when she was 14. And although China is much freer today, his malevolent influence remains, she tells Belinda McKeon

When Jung Chang visits Dublin next week to talk communism, China and chairman Mao, she'll come hoping to be put to the pin of her collar.

Praise and glory and admiration and applause will all be very welcome as well, no doubt, but what Chang really likes when it comes to these matters is to be challenged. "I am a little disappointed that nobody has said anything that has really challenged our facts," says the quiet-spoken 55-year-old, speaking from her home in London on the political biography of Mao that she co-authored with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, in 2005. "I'm pleased that this shows we have done thorough research and that they can't refute our facts. But because our research is so new, we want to have a debate. And that is something we are not having at the moment."

The "moment" of which Chang speaks, in particular, is the moment of the biography's underground entry into China itself; since she completed the Chinese translation late last year, Chang has watched as her book has been leaked, page by page, pirate by pirate, blog by blog, into the country where it is banned, just as her best-selling memoir Wild Swans has been banned since its publication in 1992.

Just as with that book, Chinese readers are finding their way past the censors to Chang's words, and while the majority of the responses have been positive ("people are incredulous," says Chang, who still visits her native province of Sichuan, where her elderly mother lives, at least once yearly), "they are finding the details about Mao just incredible. The whole thing is just so completely different from their history books."

For some readers, however, the details have been a little too different, a little too incredible, so that the Chinese response has mirrored, in many ways, the response of English-language critics in 2005, when Mao: The Unknown Story first appeared.

Then, for every prominent academic and authority on China who praised the frankness and bravery of the writing, who gushed about the value of Chang and Halliday's research in international archives, about their hundreds of interviews with people who lived and worked under Mao, there was another big name who castigated the biography.

These critics saw it as a one-dimensional portrait, obsessed with notions of evil, which diluted Mao's complexity and the complexity of the China he created - a chimera dependent on uncheckable sources, unbalanced anecdotes, unconsidered outbursts against a leader to whom there was a great deal more, said these critics, than Chang and Halliday were willing to allow.

Now, says Chang, of the internet boards where native debate over the biography continues - deeply invested in the response, She keeps a close eye on what's happening online - there is both "lively debate" and a steady diet of what she calls "insults"; claims for the greatness of Mao's leadership, dismissals of Chang and Halliday as "running dog imperialists", she says with a laugh.

"But these people are not coming up with things that have challenged our facts. People generally have said, 'well, Mao can't be so bad. I mean, what about the improvement of women's lives?', they have said, for one thing. But they never show actually how women's lives were improved under Mao, compared to women's lives in Taiwan in Hong Kong."

Other aspects of the biography that critics have found hard to stomach include its assertion that the famed 1935 battle over Luding Bridge, in which Red Army soldiers reportedly stormed a crucial river crossing, never actually took place but was sheer communist propaganda.

Chang and Halliday also asserted that Mao's "Long March", the 8,000-mile march northward on which he led Communist troops in 1934, was actually much longer than it needed to be - that Mao extended the journey by thousands of miles, putting the army through months of suffering so that he could avoid joining forces with his rival, Chang Kuo-tao. Tens of thousands of lives were lost as a result, says Chang, which has come as a "bombshell" to many readers.

The accounts of Mao as a husband and a father are just as shocking. He could have stopped the execution of his second wife by nationalist forces, says Chang, "but didn't lift a finger".

He ordered his third wife to abandon her newborn baby to certain death on the Long March, and then professed himself to be "too tired" to see the same wife, soon afterwards, when it became clear that she would die from her injuries after a bombing along the march.

THE BOOK SUGGESTS that up to 70 million people died under Mao - an increase of some 40 million on the generally accepted figure - and that the relationship between Mao and Stalin (and indeed, much later, between Mao and Nixon) was much more intricate and more cynical than previously understood - it was in Moscow that the very notion of a Chinese Communist Party first emerged, says Chang, and from there came the order "that Mao was to be worked with at any cost".

For Halliday, who is fluent in Russian and carried out a vast amount of research for the biography in the Soviet archives, which were opened in 1992, much of this information on Russian-Chinese relations came as a surprise, says Chang.

"He knew from what I had said in Wild Swans how Mao had ruled China," she says of her husband, who had 30 years previously praised some aspects of Mao's leadership and changed his views after meeting Chang and hearing her story, "but he was still very shocked by all the discoveries he made. Though I have to say we were riveted by the process. Riveted, like two detectives, but also constantly exhausted. And constantly running out of energy. But I think, of all the figures in the 20th century, there was not another person like Mao about whom so many new things could be discovered."

For Chang, the process of uncovering so much of the hidden transcript of Mao's China was deeply satisfying, because it became a process of making sense of the China of her own childhood - the cultural and political climate that defined, controlled and ultimately almost broke her own family, her own spirit.

Wild Swans might have provided some catharsis where Chang's own experiences under Mao were concerned, but it was in getting to the starkest facts of the matter, in talking to people who had known Mao, his motives, and the extent of what she calls his "utter indifference to Chinese lives", that Chang felt her way towards the full picture of the China she thought she had known. The process, it's clear, redoubled not just her anger but also her sheer relief at having escaped at the age of 26 for England; she later got a PhD in linguistics at the University of York.

"I grew up regarding Mao as our god," she says of her early childhood in Sichuan. "As children, if we wanted to say that something was absolutely true: 'I swear to c\hairman Mao'."

Chang's parents were both Communist Party officials, her father at a relatively high level in the region, and at the age of 14 she herself became a Red Guard.

At the same age, she made a pilgrimage to Beijing in the hope of getting a glimpse of Mao, which didn't go well: "I was so heartbroken when I didn't see him clearly, that for a brief moment, I thought I should commit suicide."

But it was also when she was 14 that her faith in Mao began to wane. Her parents had begun to ask questions of his economic and social policies, and they suffered during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, especially after her father criticised Mao by name.

"I saw a lot of atrocities and ghastly things happening around me. People being tortured publicly . . . My mother was made to kneel on broken glass, she was paraded in the street, children battered and threw stones at her. All this was happening around me and I loathed and hated all that, but I didn't yet question Mao, because the power of his personality cult and the terror were so strong that I couldn't even mention his name."

THAT COURAGE CAME later, in 1974, when a satirical cartoon in an English newspaper jolted Chang into the realisation that Mao was responsible for the hardships she had seen.

"I knew then that he had criminally misruled China. And I wrote about some of this in Wild Swans. But none of this had prepared me for Mao, the real Mao. No matter how badly I thought of him, I had not thought badly enough, it turned out. I mean, I thought that the great famine between 1958 and 1961, when nearly 40 million people died [ other historians place the figure at 30 million, some as low as 14 million], was as a result of economic mismanagement - that Mao was no good at managing the economy. But I discovered during my research that this was not true. The reason was that he was exporting the food these people were dependent on, to Russia mainly, to buy nuclear technology and equipment and for his ambition of building a military superpower so that he could dominate the world. And Mao knew his people were dying of starvation. But he didn't care. He said that, for all his projects to take off, maybe half of China had to die. I was just so shocked. I had not thought it was possible for anybody to think that way . . . ".

Chang sees much to be positive about in the life of China today. "You see people leading much better and freer lives there," she says, "and they can say whatever they want to say privately. But with the press and the media, the government control is tighter than even a hundred years ago. Yes, you can say anything privately, but those things would never appear on television, or in the paper."

Watching online scans of her biography, and message boards discussing - and, in particular, praising - the book disappear in their dozens every day, Chang knows a thing or two about the Chinese government's control of the internet, too. "That's where the regime has kept on Mao's legacy," she says.

She has also grown accustomed to the phone calls that let her know that a scheduled public appearance in China has been mysteriously scratched at the last minute. She mostly returns to the country now, she says, in a completely personal capacity, to visit her elderly mother.

"People have suffered so much in China . . . I am happy and excited at the changes that have made their lives better," she says. "And I wouldn't do anything that might upset that. But at the same time I am also very frustrated. Because I believe that a China that is democratic, that has the freedom of the press, and that is ruled by law, would be a really good place not just for the people of china, but for the world. Because the world can only feel at ease if China is democratic. Only if this rising superpower cannot be a threat."

The UCD Law Society is hosting a public lecture on Mao by Jung Chang in O'Reilly Hall, UCD, on Monday at 7pm. Entry is free and members of the public are asked to register their interest by sending an e-mail to law.society@ucd.ie. More details on www.lawsoc.ie