A communist party flag fluttered above the glass-topped desk in Mr Chen's office, next to an ornamental hammer-and-sickle.

'You see,' said Mr Chen, 'the feng shui of Shaoshan village is among the best in China. That's why it produced a Mao Zedong. Mao is like an emperor to the Hunanese people, a true Son of Heaven! He was a politician, a military man, a writer, a calligrapher, a poet and a thinker -- a really outstanding genius!'

Mr Chen used to be a policeman in the northern Hunanese city of Changde, but, so he told me, he admired Mao so much that he decided to come and live here in Mao's home village instead. Now he is a rose-growing entrepreneur. His investment -- row after tidy row of rose bushes -- flanks the main road into the village.

I thought it strange that an entrepreneur, of all people, should be so devoted to the man who wiped out private business in China, persecuted capitalists and wrecked the national economy for at least two decades. Shouldn't his hero really be Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the reforms of the eighties and nineties that launched the Chinese economic boom?

'Aha!' he replied, undaunted by my counter-arguments. 'But you see, Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up was only possible because of what happened before, under Mao Zedong!'

As far as I could see, this was like asserting that the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima was useful because it enabled the rebuilding of the city, but I realised there was no point in arguing with him, so I just smiled sweetly and said good night.

I had gone to Shaoshan to research Maoist cookery -- or, rather, the spurious offshoot of Hunanese cuisine that canny Shaoshan restaurateurs have named 'Mao's family cuisine' (mao jia cai). I was intrigued by the idea that a small culinary school could be named after a brutal dictator, not to mention the contradictions of Chinese people's relationship with Mao, their great national hero and nemesis. And I had long been fascinated by the ways in which Chinese cuisine had been influenced by the political upheavals of the twentieth century. Since I wanted my Hunanese cookery book to be not only about the food of the region, but about its social and political background, Shaoshan was one of the places that I felt I had to visit. It turned out to be a surreal weekend.

It turned out that Mrs Liu, or 'New Army' Liu as she had been named by her parents in a fit of revolutionary enthusiasm, was the wife of the Shaoshan Communist Party Secretary, Mao Yushi. In their main living room, Secretary Mao and his wife had the largest Mao statue I had ever seen in a private residence: a larger-than-life bronze bust on a black marble plinth, standing in pride of place, right next to the television. Unusually, it was even bigger than the TV. That evening, I sat down with the family and the communist rose-growing entrepreneur (who was lodging upstairs) to a dinner of the red-braised pork I had watched Mrs Liu make, along with some others of Mao's favourite dishes, including fire-baked fish with chilli and dried radish with smoked bacon.

After taking the bus from Changsha, I wandered through Mao's village. It was surprisingly pretty, with its surrounding cradle of hills, its green fields and orchards. In the centre there were stalls and shops selling Mao memorabilia: badges and portraits in gilded frames, cigarette lighters that played 'The East is Red'. A number of restaurants advertised their Maoist specialities. After a while I found a tranquil guesthouse that stood on the brink of a little farmland and offered its own menu of 'Mao's family cuisine'. I fell into conversation with the landlady, and we sat for a hour or more on the terrace, chatting over cups of tea as the birds twittered in the trees. She pointed out her vegetable crops and fruit trees, and recalled her childhood glimpse of Mao in 1959, when she was lifted above an adoring crowd, everyone chanting: 'May Chairman Mao live ten thousand years!' Before long, we were in the kitchen, and I was watching her make Mao's favourite dish, red-braised pork.

'Chairman Mao adored red-braised pork,' said Secretary Mao. 'And he got angry with his doctor for suggesting that he should eat less of it because it is so fatty. Actually, though, it's very healthy -- I eat two bowls of it every day, to build my brain. And you should eat it too, because it's good for the female complexion.'

Secretary Mao was not the only person I met in Shaoshan who was himself surnamed Mao. In fact, almost everyone I met there had the same name, because, as in most Chinese villages, almost everyone is distantly related. (Traditionally, women marry out of a village, while men bring their wives in from elsewhere and sire sons to continue the family line.) So when one senses that people in Shaoshan have a kind of family feeling towards their famous namesake, it's not surprising.

The village comes across as a hotbed of communism, and a throwback to a vanished era. Here, people still call each other 'comrade', whereas in the rest of China, the only people who use the term these days are gays and lesbians, for whom it has a subversive, tongue-in-cheek air.

Mao's family home, a mud-brick courtyard house, has been lovingly preserved in every detail; inside, no opportunity for communist propaganda is missed. In the kitchen, racks for smoking meat are suspended over the old wood-burning range, and a blackened kettle hangs on a hook over the open fire. 'It was by the side of the kitchen fire,' says a plaque on the wall, 'that Mao Zedong gathered the whole family together for meetings. He encouraged them to devote themselves to the liberation of the Chinese people.' In a nearby room, we are told 'this is the place where Mao Zedong used to help his mother with her household chores when he was a little boy.' The targets of all this unlikely information, mainly schoolchildren and gullible peasants, troop through the house in large parties, and have their photographs taken outside the front door.

Of course the inhabitants of Shaoshan have Mao to thank for their thriving tourist industry, so they have a financial incentive for marketing him as a national hero. But it's not just about money, and the Shaoshan villagers are not alone in their enduring love for the despot who wreaked havoc on their country. All over Hunan, otherwise intelligent and sensible people continue to view Mao as the last great leader of China, and the man who restored the country's dignity after a century of humiliation. They smile a little sadly when they reflect on his 'mistake', the Cultural Revolution, but they forgive him: after all, doesn't everybody make mistakes?

Mao Zedong's nephew, Mao Anping, drew on his cigarette as he recalled meeting his famous uncle at a dinner in Shaoshan in 1959. 'He was great fun. A really witty man. And he always spoke with a Shaoshan accent. And the funny thing was, he didn't smoke the kind of fancy cigarettes you'd expect of someone in his position. He liked the Luojia Mountain brand, made in Wuhan, you know, two mao a packet.'

They won't even blame Mao for his most atrocious crime, the man-made famine of 1958-61 that killed at least thirty million people. 'The weather was bad, the harvests were poor,' people tell me, time after time, and I can't tell if they really believe this, or if they say it because the truth is too painful to admit. The official Communist Party verdict on Mao is, bizarrely, that he was '70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong'. But in Hunan, as my friend Liu Wei told me once, 'It's more like 90 per cent right and 10 per cent wrong.'

We were having lunch in the Shaoshan Guesthouse. Mao Anping, an official in the local government, was a friend of my landlord's, and he had agreed to talk to me about Maoist cookery. We sat before a table covered in dishes. Inevitably, there was a dishful of red-braised pork, seasoned with star anise, ginger and chilli. We also ate shrimps in their shells with garlic and chilli, deep-fried fish with black beans, and a soup of pig's tripe with medicinal herbs. But most of the food was the simple peasant fare that Mao enjoyed most: spicy beancurd, wild ferns with a little pork, bitter melon with chives and pumpkin soup.

By all accounts, Mao remained a Hunanese peasant in his eating habits to the end of his life. He was addicted to spicy food, and famously told a Soviet envoy that you couldn't be a revolutionary if you didn't eat chillies. He was also said to have retorted to a doctor who advised him, in his old age, to cut down on chillies for the sake of his health: 'If you are scared of the chillies in your bowl, how on earth will you dare to fight your enemies?'

Mao's macho attitude to chillies was echoed by his dislike of the effete style and exotic ingredients of Chinese haute cuisine. While living in Changsha, I met Shi Yinxiang, the master chef who catered for him during his return visits to Hunan. The first time he had to cook for Mao, Master Shi was almost paralysed with nerves, so he questioned everyone close to the Chairman about his tastes, in order to work out a suitable culinary strategy. Fortunately for him, Mao was delighted with the rustic dishes he prepared, the steamed bacon and smoked fish laced with chilli, the beancurd and cabbage, the wild vegetables that were generally disdained as peasant food, and the coarse grains that were normally the last resort of the rural poor. In fact, Mao like them so much that he ordered the other chefs in his retinue to take some lessons from Master Shi.

It is tempting to suppose that Mao's own unsophisticated tastes and his loathing of fancy food played a part in his willingness to oversee the destruction of elite and bourgeois culture. Fine dining had always been one of the foremost trappings of wealth in China. In the dying days of the Qing Dynasty, the great mandarins still kept private chefs in their official residences, and threw lavish dinner parties. The Hunanese capital Changsha was known for its grand and glittering restaurants, ten of which were known as the 'pillars' of the trade. After the overthrow of the emperor in 1911, the Nationalist elite took on the culinary mantle of their imperial predecessors. Tan Yankai, for example, the Hunanese scholar-gentleman who served as premier in the Nationalist government, was obsessed with food. He stood over his personal chef, Cao Jingchen, in the kitchen, issuing minute instructions and detailed criticisms. Between them, the two men developed a style of cookery so extravagantly delicious that people talked about a new culinary school, Zu'an Cuisine, named after Tan Yankai's nom de plume.

Meanwhile, the poor in China were starving, and the communist movement was growing. The American writer Graham Peck described seeing a party of Nationalist officials dining lavishly in a restaurant during the hard years of the Japanese invasion, as a family of refugees stood by in silence, gazing at the food 'with narrowed, starving eyes'. For the communists, food was a political issue. In Mao Zedong's own 1927 report on the peasant movement in Hunan, he described how impoverished farmers were taking revenge on the landlords who had oppressed them. Women and children were gate-crashing temple banquets, and the new peasant associations were banning the recreational activities of the rich, including fine dining. In Shaoshan itself, it was decided that 'only three kinds of animal foods, namely chicken, fish and pork' should be served at a banquet.

When the communists took over Mainland China in 1949 at the end of the civil war, the defeated Nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan. With them, they took their household retinues, including some of the country's finest chefs, and for forty years they laid claim to being the custodians of Chinese gastronomic culture. Meanwhile, on the Mainland, the communists implemented their socialist economic reforms. In 1956, they nationalised private businesses, including restaurants, and Chinese cuisine embarked on a long, sad period of decline. But if the levelling policies of the new government had been implemented with the aim of putting food on the tables of the masses, they ended in catastrophe. In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a mass movement intended to kick-start industrialisation, revolutionise agriculture and enable China to catch up economically with the Western powers. Peasants were organised into communes, and encouraged to build backyard furnaces to make steel. Their cooking pots were melted down to feed the furnaces, private cooking was banned, and they were allowed to eat only in commune canteens. Lunatic agricultural policies took root all over the country.

Mao survived the Great Leap, politically. And then in 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, in an attempt to discredit his rivals in the Party. This violent attack on bourgeois culture and Chinese tradition affected every aspect of Chinese life, including its food. Famous old restaurants were encouraged to 'serve the revolution' by offering 'cheap and substantial food' for the masses instead of the expensive delicacies for which they were known. Many were given new, revolutionary names. In Changsha, the old Heji noodle restaurant was renamed 'The present is superior to the past', while in the northern Hunanese city of Yueyang the Weiyu Restaurant became 'Love the masses', and its former owners were persecuted as capitalists. Huogongdian, the old fire-temple restaurant in Changsha, was vandalised by a neighbourhood committee, who ripped down its most important wooden tablet and took it away to be used as a tabletop.

In an atmosphere of collective self-deception, local officials vied with one another to impress their superiors with outlandish claims of grain and steel production. Convinced that they were living in an age of unprecedented plenty, people gorged themselves, and by the winter of 1958-9 the village granaries were bare. The little food that was available was directed to urban centres, and some of it was even exported. Meanwhile, the rural population starved. Over the following three years, at least thirty million people died. Bodies lay in the fields because no one had the strength to bury them; peasants gnawed at shoe leather and the bark they stripped from trees; and the most desperate of all resorted to cannibalism.

China has been trying to recover from Maoism for the last 30 years, and since Deng Xiaoping began his programme of reforms in the eighties, the country has experienced an economic boom. After years of rationing of basic foodstuffs, there is meat on the table for many Chinese households. Perhaps some aspects of Chinese culture were damaged beyond repair by the Cultural Revolution, but in many ways the country is finding its feet once again. And one of the symptoms of this recovery has been the revival of Chinese gastronomy and haute cuisine. As they did half a century ago, the glamorous rich sit down to banquets of exotic delicacies, men (and now women) of letters write essays about food, and talented chefs seek to dazzle their customers with their skills. Mao, that coarse-mannered eater of roast corncobs, farmhouse pork and wild vegetables, must be squirming in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. There is no evidence that he ever regretted the mayhem that he caused in China. Indeed, he seemed to relish it. You can't change the world through political debate and polite conversation, Mao believed, violence and struggle are the key. 'Revolution,' as he famously said in his report on the Hunan peasant movement in 1927, 'is not a dinner party.'

That January, the three of us travelled together by bus and boat from Yueyang to the village where Fan Qun's parents still lived. It was a beautiful place, with gentle lakes and waterfalls, and steep hills clad in pine and bamboo. We spent days sitting around in the living room of the farmhouse, playing cards, chatting, and toasting our feet above the glowing embers in the brazier beneath the table. Fan Qun's mother and sister-in-law might be in the kitchen, chopping up food for supper; her father would be pottering around. Every so often, a neighbour would walk in through the unboarded, open front of the house, and linger for a few cigarettes and a cup of tea.

When I lived in Hunan, I often caught glimpses of the misery caused by the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. I spent one memorable Spring Festival with a lovely couple I had met through my friends in Changsha. Tian Zhengqian was a teacher of art and calligraphy; his wife, Fan Qun, worked in a kindergarten. Fan Qun had grown up in a remote village, but when she left school, had joined the great tide of migrant labour, and headed southwards to Guangzhou to work. Some years later, having broadened her horizons, she went to live in the northern Hunanese city of Yueyang, where her aunt introduced her to Teacher Tian as a possible husband.

Yet underlying this happy family atmosphere was the usual tragic history. Fan Qun's mother was orphaned during the famine, at the age of twelve, when both her parents died of exhaustion and malnutrition. Some of her eleven younger siblings were given away to other families, a couple died of hunger. Fan Qun's father remembered having had to forage for disgusting 'food substitutes': wild leaves and roots that were barely edible. 'Today's animals live better than we did then,' he told me. He himself, a kindly, mild-mannered man who spoke a little English, was the local schoolteacher, which made him a target of persecution during the Cultural Revolution. The illiterate people who tormented him, goaded on by local officials, were his neighbours, and most of them were relatives too. He still lives amongst them, and many are good friends; he has forgiven them all.

Fan Qun's brothers had come back from their casual jobs in Guangzhou, while she and her husband had returned from nearby Yueyang, so the whole family was together, and the mood was festive. Her parents were living in a smart, white-tiled house they had built a few years before, to replace a crumbling old farmhouse with stamped-earth floors. There was plenty to eat: meat at every meal, rice wine, treats the sons had brought back from the south.

But that's not the end of it. Teacher Tian's father was a Nationalist county chief, so his parents were blacklisted after the end of the civil war. They were sent away to reform camps, and his father eventually committed suicide under the shame of persecution. His mother, weakened by hard labour and malnutrition, died of an untreated illness when he was twelve years old, leaving him and his brothers to labour in the fields and look after themselves. Incredibly, he later taught himself to paint, and managed to enrol at art school. Somehow, he doesn't feel bitter, but accepts the past as his inescapable fate. In fact, he is one of the most cheerful people I know. When I stayed with him and Fan Qun in Yueyang, he rose early every morning to practise his calligraphy, and to sing.

To a person like me, whose parents grew up in England in the Swinging Sixties, and who has never been hungry, these wretched life stories are hard to comprehend. But in China, they are normal: scratch beneath the surface, and almost everyone you meet over the age of fifty has similar tales to tell. Yet still, in Fan Qun's parents' house, a Mao Zedong poster hangs in pride of place, over the Mah Jong table. 'We want him to protect us, to bring us peace and safety,' her sister-in-law told me, as she came to join in the New Year's fun.

I've read the eye-opening account of Mao Zedong's private life by his personal physician, and Jasper Becker's devastating book on the famine; I've read Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent, damning biography. I am well aware of the unpleasant truth about Mao. I've spent a lot of time in China trying to argue gently with my Chinese friends, to expose them to historical facts and opinions about Mao that they haven't yet heard. But, in Hunan, people didn't really want to know. They answered me with their heartbreaking platitudes about bad weather and poor harvests, and about how everybody 'makes mistakes'. So I shut up.

Lunching with Mao's nephew that day in Shaoshan, I'd had a creepy feeling. It was partly that, from behind and in profile, he bore a striking resemblance to his megalomaniac uncle, with his height, his hairstyle, and certain of his facial features. But it was also because of my own misgivings about cosying up to the nephew of a brutal dictator in an attempt to find out about his favourite recipes. Of course, Mao Anping was in no way implicated in Mao's crimes: he only met him once, after all, at that dinner in Shaoshan in 1959, when he was a young man. But was I contributing in some way to the Mao cult, and making myself complicit in the collective brainwashing of the Chinese people, by my fascination with the Chairman's diet?

A couple of critics lambasted me for it: Bee Wilson in the Sunday Telegraph said the references to Mao and the historical context of the book made her lose her appetite; Rose Prince wondered how many people a man had to murder for a dish to be named after him; and Anne Mendelson in the New York Times was critical of the pervasive use of Mao's image. Strange though it may sound, their comments took me completely by surprise.

When I finally published my Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, my publishers and I decided that the jacket should be a communist red, emblazoned in gold with the five stars of the Chinese flag. A recurring motif on the pages inside is the cover of Mao Zedong's 'Little Red Book', and his smiling face, as depicted on badges from the Cultural Revolution.

There is no way I would have a statue of Hitler on my mantelpiece. But Mao is there in my flat in London, smiling and waving amid the candlesticks and invitations. I know he was responsible for the deaths of millions. I've seen at first hand some of the consequences of his crazed political campaigns. But at the same time Mao has, in a weird way, become part of my cultural and emotional landscape. His image swings from the windscreen mirrors of buses and taxis in which I ride; it hangs on the sitting-room walls of many of my friends. He is not just a man anymore, he is a symbol of the whole gut-wrenching tragedy of China's twentieth century, from the naïve hopes and reckless optimism of the early communist state to the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution. His presence looms large over the China I know, for better or for worse. I'm used to him now, desensitised.

These thoughts are, for me, a sobering reminder of the fact that immersion in another culture doesn't come for free. It is a risky business that can undermine your own, fundamental sense of self. It was in Hunan that I really lost myself in China. I made the decision to live there like a Chinese person, and so I did. For months, Chinese became my daily language, and I spent all my time with Chinese people. Everyone knew me by my Chinese name, Fu Xia, not as Fuchsia. The outside world receded from view. I found myself not only talking like Liu Wei and Sansan and their friends, but in some senses thinking like them too. At one point I felt so utterly disconnected from my own home and background that I thought I might never leave. And it was then that I thought: I am too much of the chameleon, I can't even remember my own colours anymore.