Donald Trump's top China adviser regularly quotes a made-up expert whose name is an anagram of his own surname, it has emerged.

Peter Navarro, an economist who has written a number of books on China, has employed Ron Vara as a source in at least five of his works, quoting his anti-Beijing views.

At one point Vara is quoted saying “You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food”, at another, he said: “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.”

According to Mr Navarro's 2001 book, If It's Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks, Vara was a captain in a reserve unit during the Gulf War as well as a doctoral student in economics at Harvard University in the US.

In fact, it emerged this week, Vara is simply a figment of Mr Navarro's imagination. The ruse was revealed by Australian academic Tessa Morris-Suzuki after she was asked to write an article on anti-China a rhetoric for a local politics and foreign affairs blog.

When an online search for Vara threw nothing up, she contacted Harvard and discovered the university had no record of him. She then realised that Ron Vara was an anagram of Navarro and contacted the economist and his associates.