In 2012, Perry Anderson identified a growing body of literature that, rather than being Sinology proper, sought to answer the question: ‘China – what’s in it for us?’ It ‘consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China,’ he wrote, ‘but whose real frame of reference, determining the optic, is the United States.’ He termed it Sino-Americana.

This was a less vexed question for Australia at the time: Australia was one of the few developed nations still experiencing uninterrupted post-GFC growth, thanks largely to Chinese infrastructure spending. This was rarely admitted, though; instead, politicians were eager to portray growth as the result of enlightened antipodean economic management. Similarly, it hasn’t been politically palatable to ask whether a policy that put such a heavy reliance on the economy of another nation – often at the expense of local industries – was in Australia’s best long-term interest. Now, as the economy shows signs of waning and China under the leadership of Xi Jinping becomes more assertive, there has been an explosion of Sino-Australiana treatises. But the underlying question reflects the changing national mood, in which China is seen as less of an opportunity and more of a threat: ‘China – what risks does it pose for us?’

Peter Hartcher’s Quarterly Essay, Red Flag, is the latest contribution: repeating many of the West’s favourite clichés about China and refusing to hold a mirror up to Australian policy-making, it is a work that fails to understand China’s rise and misrepresents the nature of power and empire.

For Hartcher, the United States and its allies are guardians of the rules-based order, while China is a threat to the system. This binary blinds him to the many flaws of his analysis. For example, when he writes uncritically that ‘Barack Obama accused China under Xi of using “sheer size and muscle to force countries into subordinate positions”’, he doesn’t pause to consider that Obama’s criticism could be summed up as: ‘China is acting too much like the United States.’ But, for someone who accepts American exceptionalism as the natural order of things, these condemnations are justifiable and, considering the supposed threat, commendable.

Hartcher is quick to draw distinctions between China and western democracies, but his claims are often based on either a deliberately distorted reading of history or blind acceptance of western orthodoxy. China, with its large state-owned corporations, obviously approaches trade differently from nations in thrall of neoliberalism. However, his claims that liberal democracies like Australia and the US conduct trade for ‘mutual advantage’ is plainly wrong. In China, the unfair trade deals that European powers forced upon the much-diminished Qing dynasty following its defeat in the Opium Wars remain a symbol of colonial arrogance and overreach to this day. As Liang Qichao, one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century, observed in 1896, ‘a hundred times more than Western soldiers, Western commerce weakens China.’

Throughout the 19th century and right up until the 1920s, America was the most protectionist country in the world: in 1925, the average industrial tariff rate was 37%, which rose to 48% in 1930 with the passing of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. ‘It was only after the Second World War’, writes economist Ha-Joon Chang, ‘that the US – with its industrial supremacy now unchallenged – liberalized its trade and started championing the cause of free trade.’ The adoption of neoliberal policies in developing countries, including trade liberalisation, is often a precondition of US aid, despite the fact that it stymies growth in poorer nations and disproportionately benefits wealthier ones. In other words, the United States’ global free trade agenda is not an enlightened program based on ‘mutual obligation’ – it’s a program that serves US interests.

In many instances, China is filling the void left by the United States in the developing world. ‘At a time when the US president is calling for an end to globalisation,’ Hartcher writes, ‘Xi is opening new channels of economic activity for China and its partners.’ But this has little to do with the current occupant of the Oval Office; these ‘new channels’ exist because of the way the US has chosen to exert power across the globe. Hartcher stumbles upon this by accident, but doesn’t recognise the significance of his own words. ‘While the United States is trying to work out how to extract its remaining troops from the never-ending war in Afghanistan,’ he continues, ‘Chinese engineers are laying fibre-optic cable through the country.’ Tellingly, Hartcher’s emphasis is on the current moment and the current leaders rather than the fact that the US hasn’t built any useful infrastructure in a country it’s had a heavy military presence in since 2001. The same could be said of Iraq and much of Africa. Instead, the United States has dotted the globe with its troops and military bases – around 800 bases in about 80 countries. (China, in contrast, has one overseas military base – in Djibouti.)

Many of these bases are in countries that have signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This vast infrastructure program undoubtedly has strategic objectives, but it also addresses one of the most significant impediments to growth in developing nations. China has lifted 850 million people out of absolute poverty in the four decades to 2013 – seven out of every ten people in the world who have escaped poverty in this period were Chinese. Is it any wonder that many developing nations look to it for assistance and as a model to emulate?