Hay Budapest: Jung Chang, profile "Censorship in China is worse than it was a decade ago," she says during her Hay talk on Friday. Paradoxically, because society is becoming more liberal. With the rise of internet there are more means of spreading information available, she says - so the clampdown has become harder. The treatment of Chen Guangcheng is a distressing example of this. "If [a regime is] relaxed you don't move 100 thugs around the house of a blind man, bullying him and his wife," says Chang. "There was less promotion of Mao a few years ago," she reflects. Today there are TV series promoting him. Nobody has disputed the conclusion of my biography of Mao that he was responsible for the deaths of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime. [The government's] knowing this criminal misrule of Mao and still promoting him really is unforgivable. Political oppression has fed the ugly side of the current ecomomic boom in China says Chang, who lives in London but returns regularly to her homeland to visit her mother, now 81. I've never seen a country so materialistic, so money mad. The regime has blocked off so many of people's other interests. What do you talk about? Politics? You can't talk about that. So the Chinese obsess about cash instead, she says. In the free west a play like the Young Vic's Wild Swans can make some amends for the current government's erasure of the more embarrassing moments of communist China's past. Chang tells me, when we talk together at lunch, that it is performing an important function. There is a ban on any visual image or written image of the era of the famine [that took place in 1958 to 1961 and killed 40 million people] and the cultural revolution. Writers can't write about it, there's nothing on television, no pictures, no photographs, so people who haven't lived through that period don't have a visual image of that period. We have a quite clear picture of what it was like in Nazi Germany, there are some pictures of Stalinist Russia, but there's not a single picture of the famine. So I think the play has filled a gap. It has given a visual image of what life was about then. She hopes one day there will be a film too, but with her book still banned in China the Chinese director she would like to make it cannot do so. In the meantime, Chang is working on her third book, a biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled China in the latter half of the 20th century, a sort of Chinese Queen Victoria but with the reputation of Marie Antoinette after unjust vilification by the communists. "She is the concubine who launched the modern china," Chang tells me. Before she died her last project was to turn China into a democracy. She was an amazing woman. She was a liberaliser, and a believer in women's rights - "Due to propaganda I was under some sort of impression that it was the communists that had banned foot binding," says Chang of the brutal "beautification" process her own grandmother suffered. In fact foot-binding was banned by Empress Dowager in 1902. Most crucially, says Chang, Mao should make way for the Empress Dowager: "In China today Mao is still being treated as the father of modern China. The Empress Dowager is the only one who deserves this title.