When, in the 1950s, Henry Miller described table tennis as “a game of endless fascination” there would have been few dissenting voices among New York's cultural elite. This was a time when Lawrence's Ping Pong Parlour - a former speakeasy owned by Legs Diamond - was doing a roaring trade on the corner of Broadway and 54th. Novelists, beat poets, artists - as well as lawyers, hucksters and restless intellectuals - would pitch up in the early hours to gamble on the lime green tables while the rest of Manhattan dozed.

It took London a further half century to discover the latent chic in table tennis. It has been only in the last few years that the sport - formerly a recreational staple of the industrial North - has gravitated to the media haunts of Soho and the King's Road, dreamily played by aspiring film directors and advertising moguls. Even the City has got in on the act, with tables improbably placed adjacent to the trading floors of discerning hedge funds in Mayfair and St James's. Damon Albarn is a devotee, as is Charles Saatchi, and Howard Jacobson recently wrote his most savagely perceptive novel about the sport.

But later this month table tennis will emerge from the margins of Western hip culture to take centre-stage at the greatest show on earth. In China, ping pong is neither an urban recreation nor an ironic diversion, but a facet of national identity. It was adored by Chairman Mao and revered by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. Tables perch in metropolitan railway stations and on the dusty streets of the rural hinterland, so that commuters and farmhands can indulge their obsession. Table tennis in China is both proletarian and bourgeois, elitist and egalitarian. The kerplock-plock of ball on bat is the rhythm that unites the nation. Its history is China's history. Think cricket, football, Dickens and the Beatles - then add them together - and you will get some way to understanding the centrality of ping pong to modern Chinese consciousness.

Even Richard Nixon, that wily political animal, was astonished at how effectively the sport facilitated rapprochement between the US and China, perhaps the most seminal political realignment of the second half of the 20th century. It was sparked when Glenn Cowan, an American table tennis-playing hippy, befriended Zhuang Zedong, the legendary Chinese player, at the World Championships in Nagoya in 1971. Photos of their handshake were published in the Japanese press, emboldening Mao to issue an invitation for the US team to visit China. The seismic buzz surrounding the visit - Nixon called it “the week that shook the world” - created the political climate for the US President to visit ten months later. Mao was said to have loved the soubriquet that attached to the episode: “ping pong diplomacy”.

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It was Mao, of course, who had got the little white ball rolling in China two decades earlier, decreeing that table tennis was to become the national sport in one of his more audacious displays of political cunning. Contrary to what most sinologists assert, this was not part of an enlightened public health policy, but a costeffective means of legitimising his leadership. No dictator in history has failed to exploit the propaganda potential of sport - Castro chose baseball, Mobutu boxing, Honecker athletics. For Mao, ping pong was to be a means of demonstrating China's post-revolutionary self-confidence - more to his own people than the rest of the world, thus alleviating the so-called century of national humiliation that commenced with defeat in the Opium Wars, continued with the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion and culminated with invasion by Japan on the eve of the Second World War.

Quite why Mao chose table tennis, a sport that was dominated by outposts of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, remains obscure. Perhaps he saw in its subtlety and lack of pretention a perfect synthesis of the Chinese psyche. Whatever the reason, the policy worked. As early as 1959 Rong Guotuan triumphed at the World Championships, becoming China's first world champion in any sport. He was succeeded by Zhuang Zedong, a player of metronomic consistency, who won the next three world titles. Mao hailed his all-conquering players as icons of revolutionary virtue, proclaiming the fact that they played the game with the distinctive penholder grip, where the bat is held between the thumb and forefinger. The masses were mesmerised. Just as Mao had intended, international success proved the perfect antidote to the nation's battered self-esteem, something that would prove crucial in sustaining his legitimacy as he led the motherland through the follies of the Great Leap Forward and the iniquities of the Cultural Revolution.

But it is those periods in the past half-century when China has surrendered global table tennis supremacy that provide the deepest insights into the nation's long and troubled march towards modernity. The most recent occurred in the 1980s when Sweden, a country with a population of less than 1 per cent of China's, began to dominate the world championships with a swag ger that confounded the hierarchy in Beijing. How could a nation with less than 10,000 participants withstand the might of a country with more than 200 million fanatics? The question was apt, not least because it mirrored the growing confusion surrounding the mismatch in economic performance between the hardworking Chinese and the cosmopolitan West. Central to the answer was Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner, a handsome, blond-haired innovator who had turned table tennis into form of ballet. In 1989 he led Sweden to an apocalyptic 5-0 victory over China in the World Championship final in Dortmund - the very city in which Rong had won China's first gold medal 30 years earlier. The Chinese coaches were dumbfounded. It took Deng Xiaoping, a political visionary twice purged by Mao, to identify the problem: Chinese table tennis, like its moribund economy, was hamstrung by ideology.

Since the 1950s table tennis principles had been taught as if they were a branch of Mao's infallible teachings. The coaching manual - formally approved by the Great Leader - was believed to contain eternal truths, immovable and unflinching. It was inevitable that when Waldner developed the technical innovations that transformed the dynamics of table tennis, China was not merely unable to adapt but could not bring itself even to contemplate change. For more than six years its unreconstructed penholders endured serial ignominy on the world circuit.

By this time, Deng had already begun to think the unthinkable on the economy, asserting with subversive good sense that policies did not have to carry the late Chairman's imprimatur to be legitimate. “It does not matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice” was not merely a repudiation of Maoist orthodoxy, but a rallying call for a new kind of pragmatism. It was as if a light had been switched on in the collective consciousness of the Chinese people, unleashing a torrent of creativity in the arts, the economy and in ping pong.

Waldner was no longer seen as a harbinger of foreign cultural imperialism but was embraced as a symbol of the new commitment to innovation: his face was among the first to adorn the posters of Chinese enterprises and foreign multinationals. Waldner even put his name to a Swedish restaurant in Beijing, and locals flocked there, not so much to savour the meatballs as to associate themselves with its wider meaning.

But Waldner's service to China's intellectual development proved disastrous for European table tennis. Liu Guoliang, one of the new breed of liberated Chinese paddlers (top players were even allowed to keep half their prize money, rather than having to hand it over to the regime), developed an audacious adaptation to the penholder technique - the swivel-wristed backhand. He used it to win World and Olympic gold in the 1990s. These innovations, coupled with China's vast pool of players, ushered in a new period of domination that threatened to eclipse the 1960s. Perhaps the greatest irony occurred at the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 when Kong Linghui, a player unabashedly modelled on Waldner, defeated the ageing Swedish maestro to win gold in one of the most hypnotic finals of the past 50 years.

It is noteworthy that the Chinese team for the Olympic Games this month contains a beguiling mix: Ma Lin and Wang Hao, both exponents of the radical new penholder technique, plus Wang Liqin, a Waldner clone but with a few extra tricks of his own. It is almost certain that they, together with their female compatriots, will dominate the four medal events in Beijing. Dwindling European hopes rest on the possibility that the weight of expectation might psychologically destabilise the home players in the futuristic crucible of the University Gymnasium in the northwest of the city.

Perhaps the most intriguing question at the Olympics centres on the possible role of Zhuang Zedong, the three-times world champion from the 1960s and China's greatest ever player. The question is of historical importance because it is bound up with changing attitudes to the darkest and most contested period in the nation's modern history.

The official justification for the Cultural Revolution was to radicalise a society that was slipping into old bourgeois habits. In reality, it was a naked attempt by Mao to eliminate all threats to his power. It began in 1967 with a propaganda programme designed to create mass paranoia - pupils were incited to denounce their teachers and officials to condemn their superiors. It unleashed an epidemic of mutual suspicion that soon gave way a nationwide orgy of unspeakable brutality. Such was its universality that not even table tennis was immune - three members of the national team committed suicide under the torture of Red Guards in 1968, including Rong Guotuan, who had become the first Chinese to win a world title just nine years earlier.

Zhuang's role in the horrors did not come until after his spectacular promotion to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1972, a reward for his role in ping pong diplomacy. A fanatical Maoist, he chose to ally himself with the Gang of Four, the radical grouping led by Jiang Qing (Mao's third wife), thus implicating himself in some of the worst excesses of the era. But in the power struggle after Mao's death in 1976, the Gang of Four was arrested and Zhuang soon felt the dread hand of the state investigators.

Of his four years in solitary captivity, he later said: “I understand why they wanted to ask me questions. I had been a top political figure so I was a good source of information.” His equanimity was shocking but sincere; he was thinking of the interests of the party even as he was being persecuted by it.

He spent the first few years after his release in exile in Shanxi province but for the past two decades he has been in Beijing, involved in low-key coaching. Only in the past few years has he received official invitations to minor sporting events, raising the question of whether the watershed of the Olympics will finally enable the regime to rehabilitate those sullied by involvement in one of China's darkest infamies. But does Zhuang, who organised brutal mass denunciation meetings, deserve exoneration? The more one immerses oneself in the moral confusion of the Cultural Revolution, the less one is inclined to issue absolute judgments. Like many who put their faith in the monster that was Mao Zedong, he was a victim as much as he was a villain.

Zhuang's presence at the Olympics would, at the very least, link past and present in the beguiling story of the little white ball in Red China. It is a narrative that is both complex and revelatory, shining a powerful light into the consciousness and anxiety of the world's most populous nation. But somehow, despite the turmoil and occasional brutality, the political manipulation and opportunism, it leaves one with optimism, both for the future of China and the sport that shall always define it.

Matthew Syed was three times the Men's Singles Champion at the Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships (1997, 2000, 2001) and competed for Great Britain in two Olympic games