China is often presented as an aggressive and nationalistic monster, intent on taking over the world. Here is a short list that gives a flavour of the books about China that have been published over the past fifteen years: The Coming Conflict with China; Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World; The China Threat; Showdown: Why China wants war with the United States; Red Dragon Rising: Communist China’s Military Threat to America; Beware the Dragon: China – 1,000 years of Bloodshed. One would imagine from this flood of paranoia that China had some uniquely terrible history of colonial aggression. True, China has been no pacifist Shangri La through its history, but it wasn’t the Middle Kingdom that sailed to the other side of the world in the nineteenth century, blasted its way in to another culture, and proceeded to carve up a distant empire into spheres of influence. That was us. When our political leaders solemnly warn of China’s ‘new colonialism’ in Africa, when economists assert that Beijing wants to claim its ‘place in the sun’, and when writers speak of the day when Beijing ‘rules the world’, isn’t it them, rather than the ‘historically minded’ Chinese, who are unable to escape the past? One might describe it as an intellectual pathology. We keep getting swept up by the same currents of thought, the same foggy dreams and fears, that have always attended our encounters with China. Most of us aren’t even aware when we’re mouthing some hoary old nonsense first spouted by a Jesuit missionary five hundred years ago, or the paranoid fantasies of Victorian thriller writers, or even, on occasion, some tenet of Maoism.

The so-called Chinese ‘tributary system’, under which neighbouring Asian states were required to deliver regular gifts to the emperor, is often cited as a manifestation of China’s cultural superiority complex. Yet these states received lavish gifts in return for this tribute. Some China scholars now regard the tribute system as a cover for an expansion of foreign trade, or possibly a face-saving way for emperors to buy protection from aggressive northern raiders. In the words of the historian Joanna Waley-Cohen, ‘for tributary states the entire process primarily represented a peaceful way to acquire essential Chinese goods without having to steal them in border raids’.

Our habit of drawing parallels between the behaviour of China’s present rulers and the dynastic emperors thus misses the point spectacularly. China’s modern leaders define themselves against those old imperial times. Seeking to place today’s Politburo in an unbroken line with the Qing and the Ming makes as much sense as describing François Hollande as a successor to Louis XVI, or Barack Obama as a descendant of King George III. That rupture with imperial rule is the foundation of modern Chinese politics.

Appearances can be deceiving in China. It may seem on the surface that everyone is apolitical, but dig deeper and one can often find profound passions. Ordinary Chinese people can complain for hours about the corruption of officials, the heavy hand of the police and the gilded life of the ‘princeling’ offspring of senior Party leaders. But they have to trust you first. What always strikes me when I try to engage Chinese friends for the first time in discussions about the prospect of political reform in the country is the fear that exists. The dark cloud of Tiananmen Square and the crackdown ordered by Deng Xiaoping in 1989 still hangs heavy. Most people know what savagery the regime is prepared to sanction in order to survive. And many Chinese have learned to keep their heads down. They have a deep understanding that the regime is capable of taking everything they have and leaving them with no redress whatsoever. So, notwithstanding the bullishness of netizens, they are ultra cautious. They have learned to be discreet. And it seems to me that outsiders often misinterpret that discretion as contentment or apathy. The Chinese might not be in the streets demonstrating for full political rights like the people of the Middle East, but that does not mean they do not care about freedom. If someone asks for something and they are beaten viciously as a result, the fact that they no longer ask for it does not mean they have stopped wanting it.

Sun Yat Sen’s writings, which had been awarded the status of scripture by the republican government, had been built around the common blood of the Han. There was no room in this Chinese racial nation for the Manchu minority, from whom the emperors of China’s Qing Dynasty had been drawn and whom the nationalists blamed for leading the country into a state of semi-colonial servitude. The other ethnic minorities were also excluded. But this presented a complication: if these groups were not part of the Chinese racial nation there was no strong argument for them to remain part of the Chinese motherland. This seemed to invite colonial powers, not least Japan, to start breaking them off, dismembering the Chinese territory. The nationalist regime never coalesced around a satisfactory answer to this conceptual problem. Some scholars tried to show that all the peoples of China, including the minorities, had always been united by common blood. Others began to argue that a host of different populations in the region had been ‘melded’ over the centuries into what had become a racially unified population. Both couldn’t be true, of course. Moreover, both ideas clashed with Sun Yat Sen’s sacred racial definitions. This mess of contradictions was hardly surprising, given that the agenda of Chinese racial categorization was being driven by politics, rather than science. The objective of these scholars was not to portray reality, but to show that the sprawling and diverse empire that the nationalists had inherited after the 1911 revolution was based on something more substantial than a series of arbitrary military conquests by the Qing rulers who preceded them.

Britain has also had many Old China Hands, scholar-diplomats with an impressive knowledge of the Chinese language who present themselves to credulous politicians as holders of the secret to understanding the mysterious Chinese. Their record, alas, has been little better than that of their American counterparts. As we have seen, they advised London to stall on introducing representative government in colonial Hong Kong. They also badly misjudged the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989. Chris Patten, the former Hong Kong Governor, recounts driving past the protesting crowds with Sir Alan Donald, the British ambassador to Beijing. ‘Notice that the police are wearing brown plimsolls,’ Sir Alan said. ‘You don’t wear plimsolls if you’re going to stamp on people.’ Patten recorded how the diplomat went on to explain to him that the confrontation between students and the regime was ‘a sophisticated Chinese drama in which everyone knew their part and in which tradition and shared national ambition would help to secure an accommodation in which all would be able to save face’. If only that had been true.

Chinese people today sometimes describe themselves as ‘sons and daughters of the Yellow Emperor’. This is often said with such conviction that we tend to assume this is a folk belief in a common racial origin that stretches back deep into China’s long history. In reality the cult of the Yellow Emperor was largely created in the early twentieth century. It was the centrepiece of a propaganda exercise by the republican government of Sun and his successors. There were sixteen official addresses between the 1911 revolution and the fall of the republic in 1949 declaring the Yellow Emperor to be the progenitor of the Chinese state.

The Qing rulers of China had banned the sale of opium in their territory out of concern over its harmful social effects. The British state, under the influence of a merchant lobby, picked a fight and imposed the drug on Chinese markets by force. One can argue, as many Chinese do, that the Qing were foolish to attempt to insulate their country from European influence. But it is a strange leap to argue that Chinese isolationism justified the conduct of the British or the other European powers that piled into China after Britannia had kicked the door open. One defence sometimes still aired is that the British were merely meeting a demand for the drug in China. By this rationale the Mexican military would today be justified in launching a bombardment of American border towns on the grounds that cocaine is popular in America and US prohibition is damaging the bottom line of its drug cartels. Some of the Qing aristocracy were partial to opium, say the apologists. Do they seriously believe that international relations should be established on the principle that nations with hypocritical rulers can legitimately be invaded? In the end all this desperate rationalization demonstrates our own continuing state of denial when it comes to facing up to our colonial history.

Like the Jesuits before them, what these modern evangelists really seem to want is moral reform at home. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD statistician whom we met in the education chapter, remarked approvingly after a trip to China that, as he put it, the most impressive building in a poor town is likely to be a school. In the West, according to Schleicher that status would go to a shopping mall. ‘You get an image [in China] of a society that is investing in its future, rather than in current consumption,’ he said. What Schleicher failed, however, to mention was the fact that China still spends a smaller share of its GDP on education than any developed nation. Nor did he appear to notice that in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, as we have seen, a series of schools collapsed crushing hundreds of pupils to death as they studied. These ‘most impressive buildings’ were made of substandard concrete because corrupt officials and builders had apparently compromised safety standards to cut their construction costs. Locals called them ‘tofu buildings’ because they crumbled under pressure like cubes of bean curd. Then again perhaps this is to miss the point, because Schleicher was not really talking about the Chinese education system so much as bemoaning what he regarded as the Western world’s culture of decadent consumerism.

In the 1990s the Chinese government decided to grab more global business for its manufacturers – a practice traditionally known as ‘mercantilism’ – by holding down the value of its currency. The lower the value of the renminbi against the US dollar, the more successful the country’s exporters in world markets. To achieve this currency depreciation the monetary authorities bought up large quantities of dollars, recycling the proceeds into American government debt. And it worked: Chinese exporters boomed and the country registered a large trade surplus. Normally when a country experiences an export boom its currency strengthens as foreign money rushes in, but the Chinese government was not prepared to let that happen. They wanted the export growth to continue. They kept their capital markets closed and persisted with mercantilism. They acquired still more dollars, holding the value of the renminbi down and locking in the exchange rate stimulus for the domestic manufacturing industry. On the eve of the 2008 global financial crash China’s current account surplus had reached 10 per cent of the country’s output and the state had accumulated around $1.5 trillion of US financial assets. That figure has since grown to $3.4 trillion. Most of those assets are US Treasury bonds, making Beijing the single largest creditor of the United States government. Some have suggested that these vast holdings of dollar debt put China in a position of geopolitical strength. The argument seems to be that Beijing can assert itself in negotiations with America by threatening to dump its bonds and cause a lethal spike in US interest rates. This is, however, deeply confused. If Beijing were to start off-loading its US debt holdings out of some desire to punish America it would crash the entire market for the securities and inflict massive paper losses on its own portfolio. Moreover, an exchange rate correction is already gradually taking place. The fundamentals of global supply and demand are reasserting themselves. The dollar is falling and the renminbi is gradually rising to reflect America’s trade deficit and China’s correspondingly stronger position. This means China’s accumulated dollar assets are sinking in value. The massive investment that the Chinese government made – equivalent to $2,500 for every man, woman and child in China – looks destined to deliver a significant loss.