Jung Chang on Empress Cixi, and Mao's murderous legacy

It's when I meet Chang at a hotel nearby that she tells me about her much darker experiences of Hyde Park, such as the time she was walking there with her mother. There were some large stones lying on the ground, she says, and her mother pointed at them in dismay.

"They are just like the stones that were used to weigh down little girls in China," said Chang's mother. Weighing down baby girls with stones meant they couldn't escape the agonising process of feet-binding; they couldn't get away from the pain. Chang's grandmother was one of the last women it happened to.

The flowers in the park also have a darker meaning for Chang. This is late April so there's a profusion of peonies and primroses and crocuses, but even they point to some of the horrors of China under Mao. With the kind of illogical zeal for which he became infamous, the dictator, who ruled China for 30 years until 1976, declared flowers were bourgeois and should be ripped up; he also declared starlings were enemies of the state and had them exterminated. Chang says she came to Hyde Park when she first moved to London and its flowers reminded her of the madness. But all the colour that was impossible and illegal in her home country filled her with joy, too.

The ban on flowers was only the beginning of Mao's madness, as anyone who has read Chang's shocking, epic biography - Mao: The Unknown Story - will know. Chang, who is still most famous for her family memoir Wild Swans, spent 12 years writing the Mao biography and as she did so, her hatred for him grew. She estimates that Mao was responsible for 70 million deaths, direct and indirect. She tells me that in the old courtyard in Yibin in the south-west of China where she and her parents lived with three other families, at least two people killed themselves because they could not bear the persecution and oppression under Mao, the torture and the torment.

Chang knows of at least 100 suicides alone in her circle of family and friends; her father also died in a labour camp. All of it has left her with a hatred for Mao and her book is the prosecution case against him. Needless to say, it is banned in China. In fact, Jung Chang herself, the very idea of her, is also banned and you will do an internet search for her there in vain. "I am a non-person," she tells me.

She has occasionally been allowed back in to China (and hopes to go there again soon to visit her mother, who is in hospital) but when she does return, she is continually dismayed by the fact Mao is still revered as the man who modernised China when he did precisely the opposite. Chang believes the real moderniser of her homeland was the Empress Cixi, the subject of her latest book and her appearance next weekend at the Boswell Book Festival in Ayrshire. Cixi may have ruled from the middle of the 19th century, but she could see into the 20th and believed in opening doors to the west and a free press. It was also Cixi who banned foot-binding.

Over coffee and water at the hotel, Chang tells me, in her semi-whispered voice, that it was discovering this fact about Cixi piqued her interest in the empress. "I grew up being taught Cixi was this vicious woman," she says, "a despot who dragged China behind the world and made a mess of the country. But when I was writing Wild Swans, I realised that it was Cixi who banned foot-binding, which tortured Chinese women for 1,000 years, even though people are still saying it was the Communists."

Chang also had a personal connection to the story through her grandmother Yu-fang. Cixi officially banned foot-binding in 1902, but the change happened gradually across China and it came too late for Chang's grandmother. I ask Chang what she remembers of the effect on her grandmother of foot-binding, which only leaves the big toe to grow naturally, and she says she remembers Yu-fang having to soak her feet after going out because walking was such agony. Chang recounts the gruesome detail of it all.

"I saw these four toes crushed and lifeless; they were dead," she says. "The bones were crushed. My grandmother had a little purse with all the tools for cutting the toenails and the dead skin from the toes because the toenails kept growing and they would grow into the flesh so I saw her flipping a toe and cutting it. I felt the pain for her. She said people told her she would get used to the pain, but she never did. That made a big impression on me."

Chang says she is disappointed that Cixi's role in ending foot-binding has largely been forgotten, as has the empress's place in allowing social, cultural, educational and sexual freedoms that were taken for granted by many Chinese people in the early 20th century. When Mao himself was growing up in the latter part of Cixi's reign, he was able to write for newspapers and criticise the government, he was able to stay with his girlfriend in hotels and travel abroad, and he was able to access scholarships to go to school and college - rights that many could never have dreamed of under Mao. Even worse, says Chang, the current regime in China has tightened rather than loosened its grip. In many ways there was more freedom under the empress Cixi than there is in China now. "In terms of state repression," says Chang, "it's worse than it was under Cixi."

Chang is profoundly depressed by this and isn't hopeful that it will change soon; in fact, she believes it's getting worse. "My name and my books are blocked from the internet," she says. "There used to be a lot but I have seen the tightening up in a gradual way. Now, mentions of me are virtually zero. They have an internet censorship team who every day are deleting all sorts of things that are not to their liking and attacking people who say things the party doesn't like. They are unashamed about it - they are called internet 'guides', to 'guide' the public opinion."

Chang says the tight control of the internet has also contributed to the cult of Mao and created what she believes is a false impression that all Chinese people revere the dictator. Some see him as a god to be appeased, but Chang believes people are simply too afraid to say anything critical of him. She remembers when she lived in China, a friend of the family absent-mindedly scribbling on a newspaper that carried a picture of Mao. He was denounced, tortured in public and then killed himself. Fifty years on, in some ways nothing much has changed: any sign of disrespect towards Mao will not be tolerated.

"I find this totally unacceptable and I'm in despair about it," says Chang. "The previous regime in China seemed to be reducing Mao's profile but the current regime is making Mao an issue; they are promoting him in a big way. I think because they find the internet more difficult to control than the printed press, they are worried about the demise of the one party monopoly so they try to hang on to Mao to legitimise the rule of the party. I just hope that the regime will not believe in its own public opinion, opinion that it created, because that would be disastrous."

I ask Chang if she thinks the giant portrait of Mao that hangs in Tiananmen Square will ever come down and she thinks it's unlikely. "I doubt it because of the intense brain washing in China and the effect of that can never be underestimated. And I see no sign of the regime changing."

This pessimistic view of China and the prospects for change mean that returning to her home country is difficult. She is 63 years old and has lived in the UK since becoming one of the few Chinese to be allowed to come here to study in the 1970s. In the 80s, she met and married the academic Jon Halliday, with whom she wrote her Mao biography, and lives in Notting Hill. She hasn't been back since 2013 and is uncertain about how any application to visit will be received this time. She is about to find out because her mother is in hospital and Chang would like to go out and see her.

"I am trying to go which would be the test," says Chang, "because my mother has broken her back, she is 84, and she's in hospital. She may also have had a small stroke because her speech is slurred. I was allowed to go two years ago, but I was watched while I was there and I was under surveillance. The state security visited me and followed me. But all I want is to see my mother."

In the meantime, Chang is looking for a new writing project (inspiration hasn't struck yet) and is looking forward to a few days at the Boswell Book Festival, which for the first time is being held at Dumfries House near Cumnock. She will be talking about Wild Swans, which has sold more than 13 million copies, but also spreading the word on Empress Cixi.

I wonder though if she hasn't been too soft on Cixi in the way that she was tough on Mao. In Chang's book on Mao, there are no shades of grey, but in her book on Cixi, there are many. Chang admits she was ruthless (one plotter was cast down into a well to die and others were handed a piece of white silk, which was a signal to kill themselves) but the emphasis is on her courage and vision (as well as banning foot-binding, it was Cixi who ended the use of death by a thousand cuts). Was Chang a little too ready to find excuses for Cixi and her killings in a way that she wasn't with Mao?

"She was the absolute ruler of a third of the world's population - it's impossible for a person to be in that position without having blood on their hands," says Chang, "but what I appreciate was that under her the bloodshed was minimal."

Was she a good person in the way that Mao was bad?

"Yes, under her, she ruled for nearly half a century and her killings were very few. Mao was responsible for the deaths of 70 million and Cixi was a couple of dozen. You have to see her in the context of the 19th century."

For Chang, it's simple: Cixi was good in the way that Mao was bad. Mao ordered the flowers pulled up from the ground; Cixi wore them in her hair.

Jung Chang is at the Boswell Book Festival on Sunday, May 10, at 2pm. Visit boswellbookfestival.co.uk