IF you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the little red book and those cute Mao button badges that were such useful fashion accessories for those of an agitprop tendency back in the seventies.

Thirty years after Mao Zedong’s death, it’s doubtful if those artefacts have anything other than nostalgia value, but nobody can say the same about the man himself. In China he has achieved a kind of immortality, even if his thinking has been overtaken by the free market economy. His unmistakable features still adorn every banknote and his body remains in a mausoleum in the centre of Beijing. True, the mummified remains are looking kind of waxy now, but on the nearby Gate of Heavenly Peace Mao continues to peer down on the throngs who have exchanged his harsh brand of socialist idealism for the gentler delights of Western consumerism.

So, where does he stand in the pantheon of world leaders of the 20th century? As happens to everyone in that position, he has been the subject of much rabid historical revisionism, and Mao’s legacy has been found to be wanting.

We now know more about the violence he visited upon the people of China and the mayhem that resulted in millions of deaths. During the Great Leap Forward, the attempt to take China into the modern world between 1958 and 1962, an estimated 30 million Chinese died, mostly from starvation, and when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao remained unapologetic as the notorious Red Guards rampaged through the land extirpating anything which smacked of backsliding. Mao’s response to the killings is instructive: “The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are.”

We have also been able to glimpse behind the façade created by his notorious Gang Of Four and the influence wielded by his fourth wife, Jiang Qing. This was a corrupt and self-seeking set-up that belied Mao’s public statements about creating a new China. On that score it’s worth pointing out that although his ideology was deeply flawed, Mao had a genius for taking complex political ideas and putting them into simple terms which even the least sophisticated person could understand. Remember “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” or “all reactionaries are paper tigers”? Brilliant.

But the old saw’s true: fine words don’t butter many potatoes. Mao swept his people along with him on a tide of rhetoric, but his aim of destroying the family as an institution was an aberration from which China has never really recovered. Equally barmy were his theories about collectivised farming, which saw Chinese people starve while Mao ordered a sharp increase in the export of rice and grain to socialist neighbours. Recent studies of the so-called Great Leader have stripped away the façade of his facile thinking and revealed a monster with unappetising personal tastes who frequently appears to be nothing short of nuts.

And yet it would be wrong to write him off completely, or to try to expunge his influence from history’s pages. Mao had to be ruthless because he was surrounded by rivals, and he genuinely believed that the future of the communist revolution had to be more energetic than the revisionism practised by his Soviet contemporary Nikita Khruschev.

Today, older people in China look back at Mao’s reign with a certain simple-minded fondness as a time when crime was low and solidarity was everything. It’ll stay that way too: among China’s political elite there has been no attempt at re-evaluation, for the very good reason that such dangerous thinking is expressly forbidden. Mao would have approved.