That figure only includes people who were murdered by Mao - and in peace time, which is completely unprecedented in the history of the world.' We didn't even count people like my grandmother's death - which should really be on Mao's account. 'Seventy million killed at the absolute minimum. The result of more than 10 years of research, trawling archives all over the world and hundreds of interviews, she hopes that Mao: The Unknown Story will leave readers in no doubt that his 27-year rule was one of the most merciless in a cruel century. 'And yet the world knows astonishingly little about him.' 'He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did,' Chang says.

Now, with her long-awaited second book co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, Chang aims to expose the true character of the man responsible for so much misery - Chairman Mao. For many in the west, Wild Swans was their first real insight into life under the Chinese Communist party. Published two years after the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Jung Chang's family memoir, following the lives of three generations of women through China's terrible 20th century, arrived at just the right time to satisfy a readership hungry for information about this unknown country. It wasn't just a popular success appealing mainly to women (as is sometimes sniffily assumed), it was also acclaimed by literary heavyweights such as Martin Amis and JG Ballard. The biggest grossing non-fiction paperback in publishing history, it sold more than 10m copies worldwide and was translated into 30 languages. There was a moment in the early 1990s when everybody everywhere seemed to be reading Wild Swans.

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