Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Purveyors of leftist orthodoxies wear heavy boots, and you can hear them approaching.

In ``Adam Smith in Beijing,'' Giovanni Arrighi, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has written a book that I fear could become the new orthodoxy on China.

Though Marxists have struggled to explain the eclipse of communism, religions never quite die. They just adapt to survive. Arrighi pins his leftist hopes on the rise of Asia. His book amounts to a prayer that China will displace the global dominance of the U.S. economy and way of life.

No one should be surprised that the center of economic gravity is shifting from America to Asia, he argues. Already in the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote in ``The Wealth of Nations'' that China was following a ``natural'' path to development, concentrating on agriculture before industry and international trade. This Arrighi describes as an alternative path to opulence.

In fact, the Scottish economist also wrote that China's failure to open its ports robbed the country of foreign machinery and techniques, restricting its manufacturing capacities. Arrighi waves this aside, underlining instead that Europe's emphasis on trade caused the West to develop in what Smith called an ``unnatural'' way.

In Arrighi's clomping interpretation, this is taken to mean that Western capitalism has always been rapacious, imperialistic and militaristic. The wiser, more humane and peaceable Chinese of the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) meanwhile concentrated on developing a non-capitalist home market under state supervision. After the colonial period, China reverted to this model under Mao Zedong, he writes.

Masochistic Arguments

Arrighi voices hope that China will build on this benign tradition and her current success to undermine the economies of the developed world and to inspire developing nations to throw off their chains.

His arguments are a mixture of the Manichaean and the masochistic. For centuries, he insists, Europe and North America have visited every evil on the helpless, blameless developing world. Now, it's payback time. There's no suggestion here that liberal democracy might have any attractions -- or that the theocracies, authoritarian regimes or half-crazed dictatorships of the developing world have anything to learn from it.

Marxism is an incantatory creed, and Arrighi's maledictions are endlessly repeated: ``China is the true winner of America's war on terror,'' he intones. U.S. hegemony is in the throes of a ``terminal crisis,'' he says.

Veneer of Scholarship

One crisis Arrighi doesn't mention is that of intellectual standards. Beneath a veneer of scholarship, this is an emotive book, its arguments often crude, slippery or disingenuous.

As an apologist for Maoism, for example, Arrighi has to reconcile China's relative successes of today with its disastrous past. One way is to ignore it: He's careful not to dwell on the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, the industrialization drive that left some 35 million Chinese dead.

As for the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, the author makes assertions that many Chinese would regard, politely, as barking mad. For him, this bout of chaos, death and destruction ``laid the groundwork for the success of the economic reforms.''

Arrighi is one of those old-fashioned European Marxists who seem deranged by America. The thought of all those Yanks tending their suburban lawns drives him crazy. Sometimes you feel almost sorry for him. There's something pathological about his loathing and something touching about an aging revolutionary casting about for his new, post-Soviet Arcadia.

I too admire many things about China. But I don't get starry-eyed about it, and for good reason. I spent a couple of years as a diplomat in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and have seen more brutality and corruption on recent visits.

What we need on China is realism, though that doesn't mean hostility. One of the few things I agree with in this book is that it's a mistake to approach the new China as if conflict were inevitable.

Meanwhile it's sad to think that books like this may find an audience among impressionable college students, whose understanding of Chinese communism may be as flaky as their disillusionment with American democracy is profound.

``Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century'' is published by Verso (418 pages, $35, 25 pounds).

(George Walden, a former U.K. diplomat and member of Parliament, is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: George Walden at GWASHCH@aol.com.

Last Updated: November 18, 2007 12:01 EST