KEY POINTS:
A recent book by Will Hutton of the Guardian newspaper, The Writing on the Wall, raised some interesting issues about the West's understanding of China.
Hutton's book is pretty awful. It reads like something from a sociology student who has dabbled in economics and writes about it in an unnecessarily complex manner, presumably to persuade laymen that he knows what he is talking about. Some of the passages make no sense at all.
It's a pity, because Hutton has a great deal of influence in London. His book was reviewed in somewhat exaggerated terms by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, an incomparably superior writer, who even understands economics. But such is the way of close-knit media circles. They review each other's books and pat each other on the back.
Hutton's main thesis is that China needs "enlightenment values", or the soft side of capitalism, to reconcile the cracks emerging as a result of the country's rapid growth. In fact, great swathes of this book are not about China at all, but about the US and Iraq, the UK and a potted history of key Western institutions.
The bits that are about China are culled from 18 months of reading all the books that people have written about China. As a result, it reads like a compendium of other people's thoughts.
Stephen Green, Joe Studwell, Fraser Howie, James Kynge and numerous other writers who actually went to the trouble of doing some original research are cannibalised to further Hutton's ends.
In short, Hutton is one of the school of thought who believes that unless China adopts Western institutions, it will fail - hence the title.
Take his attitude towards corruption. He sees this as an important precursor of collapse. A very superior China analyst, Arthur Kroeber, who edits the China Economic Quarterly, has recently pointed out, however, that corruption in China is not necessarily an indication of a country going to the dogs.
He uses the term "zero sum corruption" to illustrate the kinds of rapacious, predatory corruption that characterise many parts of Africa. This involves rich, powerful people sucking the blood out of the country.
That's quite different to China, where rising corruption somewhat perversely reflects the rising wealth of the country - similar to the corruption that accompanied America's stunning rise to global eminence.
Nor does Hutton, who can't speak Chinese and doesn't appear to have engaged with China before he started on his project 18 months ago, understand the pace of change in China.
I was recently interviewing a young entrepreneur in Shanghai who has set up a film company. He was at great pains to stress how mysterious and actually scary he finds his elders - his parents' and grandparents' generations.
"We grew up during China's opening to the outside world and during the period of its economic reforms. We are completely different to our parents. We are selfish and practical, we like to spend money, we like debt, we are fashion-conscious, we hate people intruding on us, and we are highly competitive," he told me over a fruit drink in a swanky cafe in a five-star hotel.
Yet the biggest factor behind this familiar mentality has very little to do with Western influences.
It's largely because China's one-child policy has churned out a generation of arrogant youngsters, on whom their parents have lavished the best education and training money can buy.
As I walked past Shanghai railway station, I spotted a chubby 12-year-old (being overweight is the downside of being spoilt by your parents and two sets of grandparents) in the company of his mother and his grandmother.
The impressive thing was that he was haranguing a guard about train times. His obnoxiousness was there for all to see, but the fact that he was behaving like the "man of the house" and ensuring he and his family got home safely was rather impressive.
As for China's numerous economic problems, the immaculately dressed Italian fund manager I also met in Shanghai probably has the right perspective: "If having a massive trade surplus, enormous savings reserves, and the biggest forex pile in the world are problems, then bring them on," he said.
What China says to me about capitalism is rather different to Hutton's take on it. What it's shown to me is that capitalism is such a strong beast that it can cope with all kinds of distortions and yet still be successful.
The Chinese don't have proper property rights, legal safeguards or democracy.
Yet they are being given the opportunity to compete for wealth on an increasingly even playing field.
This is all anathema to Hutton, of course, who, being left-wing, wants to believe in the perfectibility of human nature and, more importantly, a system that provides that role for the state.
My experience in China is far more along the lines Voltaire described in Candide: most people just "want to cultivate their garden", left in peace by Governments and anybody else who stops them having a better life.
