The Beijing Olympics may hasten China's opening up and increase outside pressure on the communist party to ease social controls, a leading Chinese author has argued.
However, Jung Chang, author of the best-selling Wild Swans and a biographer of Mao, said she would also support those protesting against the host nation during next year's games.
"The people who go to the Olympics, they can go and see Mao's portrait and say, 'what's this guy doing here? He has murdered 70 million of his own people, your fellow countrymen. Why is he still there?" she told The Irish Times.
"But I also support people making protests, because in China itself there is no voice of protest. We rely on the outside world to put pressure on the Chinese regime."
Jung Chang is best known for her family memoir Wild Swans, which has sold over 10 million copies since its publication in 1991 but is banned in mainland China. She was in Dublin yesterday to discuss Mao: The Unknown Story, which she co-wrote with her husband, the historian John Halliday.
The biography was published in 2005 after 12 years' work. Chang said Mao did not impinge on western historical memory in the same way as dictators such as Hitler and Stalin because certain legacies of Maoist times endured in China's current regime.
"China is still a communist dictatorship. It still brainwashes people, and it still brainwashes the young generation to think that somehow human life can be sacrificed for building the military superpower.
"Russia has changed, Germany has changed, so there is no change to sponsor this view, there is no state to brainwash people into thinking in this way."
While the core of Mao's ideology has been abandoned in today's China, some instruments of state power - such as control of the media and restrictions of freedom of expression - have been retained, she added.
Meanwhile, Chang's biography was challenged yesterday by a Dublin-based Chinese academic.
Speaking at a debate in the Humanities Institute at UCD, the director of the Irish Institute for Chinese Studies, Liming Wang, said the book gave a "one-dimensional" view of its subject where a "multifaceted" one was required.
He disputed the claim that Mao had been responsible for 70 million deaths, saying the highest estimate he had read was 30 million, and criticised the book for giving the impression that "China today is no different from 30 years ago."
Ms Chang replied that the figure of 70 million was "extremely well sourced". The figure included all those who had been executed or died in prison, as well as those who died of starvation, overwork or during the Cultural Revolution.
She accepted that modern-day China was "completely different" and denied that her book gave any other impression.
