Just what the Chairman ordered

Chairman Mao's Favourite Pork is a hot-pot of fatty pig's knuckle in a spicy red soup with a sweet aftertaste.

It's the house specialty at a restaurant dedicated to China's former supreme leader in his home town of Shaoshan in Hunan province.

The owner of the restaurant is a sprightly 77-year-old woman, Tang Ruiren, who met Mao back in 1959 and is an unapologetic supporter of the Great Helmsman.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong, who is seen by many outside his country as the dictator responsible for the deaths of millions in the disastrous agricultural collectivisation reforms of the Great Leap Forward and the terrible purges of the Cultural Revolution.

In the Great Helmsman's home town, and in large areas of China, widespread affection remains for Mao.

Tang, recounting her experiences to Communist Party faithful and media, tells the story of how she met Mao in 1959, when he came on a secret visit to his home town.

The photograph of her and her family meeting Mao is on display, and visitors are given a laminated version to keep.

"We were the first family he saw when he came home," Tang says. "Mao Zedong asked if my husband was at home, and I told him my husband was a soldier, just like my father and just like my son was going to be. He told me I was a model citizen."

Tang is Mao's great-aunt, even though she was decades younger than the Chinese leader, who was 64 when he made his trip home. The baby she is holding in the picture went in his early teens to fight in China's war against Vietnam. He was Mao's uncle.

"I was holding my son in my arms, and his name was Little Mao. Mao told me he should have a grown-up name, and we should call him Mao Jingjun."

Tang barks out orders to the staff as they serve up All of China is Red fish-heads, a piquant dish that looks like a map of China in 1949, with the self-ruled Taiwan boldly marked out at the dish's edge.

She is moved to tears when asked what she was doing when the news came through in 1976 that the Great Helmsman was dead.

"I was at a meeting discussing how to implement the one-child policy when we heard the funeral march music on the radio. I sat down and lost consciousness and when I came around I cried for hours.

"I dreamed about him many times. I saw him in the sky and said to him: 'Why did you leave us?'

"He said: 'It will be fine. And you have a son ahead of you'."

For Tang, it has worked out nicely. She prayed for him and his ancestors at a Buddhist temple. And when the economy began to open up in the 1980s, she set up a restaurant with peppercorn capital of 1.70 yuan, 33c in today's currency.

Now she has a chain of 120 restaurants, with 18,000 employees, and pays tax equivalent to $11.5 million a year, most of which she says she gives to a foundation supporting the education of 500 orphans.

"It's not my money, it belongs to the people of China. I just distribute it to the people," Tang says. "Mao is the pride of Shaoshan. He went from this poor town to the Forbidden City and became one of the 10 most famous people in the world. Everyone here idolises him.

"His diplomatic work made him famous with foreigners and I welcome every guest here as a guest of Chairman Mao."

Down the hill is Mao's childhood home, a renovated courtyard house, solid, ringed by bamboo and with soldiers posted in every room. It is a place of pilgrimage, now thronged with tourists.

In the kitchen, you can see where Mao gathered the whole family for meetings "to devote themselves to the cause of the liberation of the Chinese people".

You learn that Mao's father was a "hardworking, thrifty, smart and crackajack man", while his mother "delighted in Buddhism and to help others".

This would have been a rough and ready, if reasonably prosperous, farmhouse, shared with another family and their livestock.

Now the area is landscaped and speakers blare out tales of the Chairman's diplomatic triumphs, meetings with world leaders, the respect in which he was held by Chou En-lai, and how much he loved reading.

Further up the hill, stalls offer an array of Mao memorabilia, mass-produced statues, portraits, cigarette-lighters, magnets. You can have your picture taken with a cardboard cutout of Mao sitting in his favourite armchair.

Mao came back to Shaoshan in 1966 in secret, and the villa he stayed in has also been transformed into a shrine.

The wooded walkway to the villa is lined with calligraphy by Chinese leaders, including poems and epigrams. The villa has a nuclear-fallout bunker built for the Chairman's short two-week stay, and an earthquake-proof room now lined with medals.

And there's a table-tennis table, testament to the ping-pong diplomacy which signalled the start of China's slow opening up to the world.

"Mao was a great man, I admire him," says Jian Jun, a 23-year-old television executive. "I've taken a lot of friends up here to Shaoshan - once people hear I come from here, they always ask me about him first thing. I learned about all the great things he did from my textbooks at school."

Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals and published last month, is an eloquent but damning description of the destruction wrought by the Cultural Revolution.

And Jung Chang and Jon Halliday blasted Mao as a power-crazed despot in their biography Mao: The Unknown Story.

Chinese people in general are much more ambiguous about Mao's legacy.

The Communist leadership describes the Cultural Revolution as a catastrophe for China and has reassessed the Great Helmsman, saying he was 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad.

But Chinese textbooks make but brief mention of the Cultural Revolution, or the Great Leap Forward.

Many taxis have Mao statues on the dashboard, and his political legacy is still enormous - his face is on the banknotes, a portrait of the shrewd son of Shaoshan still gazes out over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and statues are still being put up in his memory, including some in Tibet.

Nearly every room in the villa has hundreds of photographs of Mao's allies, although, pointedly, there are none of Deng Xiaoping, Mao's successor and the man credited with opening up China after Mao's death.

Deng was exiled during the Cultural Revolution and his son was paralysed after Red Guards threw him from a window during interrogation.

Deng worked hard to end the cult of Mao, and his name is mentioned with disdain in Shaoshan.

"As someone born in the 1980s, I have only a vague impression of Mao. His era is a bit remote, but I don't have the direct experience that my parents have," says We Feihong, who runs a hotel management training business.

"I respect Mao and I don't like to hear negative things about him. He's like an idol.

"If it weren't for Mao I probably wouldn't be here - I'm the fourth girl in our family and he always encouraged people to have lots of children."

Before leaving Hunan, we again sample some of Chairman Mao's favourite dishes, this time at a swish designer restaurant in a shopping mall in Changsha.

It's the kind of place that could not have existed during Mao's lifetime. Yet, on every table, there is a complimentary copy of the famous Little Red Book containing the Thoughts of Chairman Mao.

Even in this bastion of boomtown New China, some things never change.

- INDEPENDENT