By Troy Parfitt

In the maelstrom that is the American media, China references are surfacing with increasing frequency. Mentions range from reports on accidents to predictions China will knock America off its superpower plinth. China has become a big deal, but not so big it’s being put under the microscope. Instead, America prefers to view it through the figurative telescope, with the upshot that what China is, at a microcosmic level, remains utterly unclear. “Those who go beneath the surface,” warned Oscar Wilde, “do so at their own peril.” However, America’s mélange of frivolous views doesn’t derive from Oscar Wilde, but intellectual lethargy.

It’s not like there isn’t information available from which to construct a cogent, multifaceted analysis. You can find good, China-themed articles in The Economist and decent ones in Time. Foreign correspondents often have their finger on the Middle Kingdom’s pulse, and any self-respecting bookstore ought to have a shelf or two of China volumes, if not a voluminous rack. Modern Chinese history has been excellently documented in English (mainly by British and American historians), and if the curious find the past too dreary or dense, they can read Peter Hessler, an American journalist and writer who went to China as an English teacher with the Peace Corps. Hessler has penned three books on China, River Town, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving, employing a style both accessible and erudite. He excels at depicting a China in transition and the effects on “old hundred names”, or ordinary Chinese.

For non-readers, there is film. The BBC has done documentaries on China’s rise and its education system, available online. Even the phlegmatic Ted Koppel cobbled together an engaging series for the Discovery Channel called The People’s Republic of Capitalism (even if China’s system is better described as state-capitalism), shedding light on China’s economic model, highlighting America’s and China’s fiscal interdependence, and, like Hessler, getting feedback from the people. Charlie Rose appears obsessed with China, and if his eponymous program is too highbrow, viewers can tune in to the Late Show With David Letterman, where the host is sure to quip about America’s economy going down the tubes, and that soon, Americans will be speaking Chinese.

Though only a joke, Letterman’s shtick speaks to the Manichean and sensationalized nature of the discussion. It strengthens the perception that we reside in a bipolar world, not a multipolar one, and it works to affirm the widespread belief that China is going to, literally or figuratively, rule the world.

The appeal of the China-to-rule argument hinges on anyone being able to make it. It takes heaps of research to talk about what China is, very little to explicate on what it might become. While pundits hypothesize about China’s prospects, Americans come no closer to grasping its essence. Americans don’t have the right answers for China because they aren’t asking the right questions.

Also at issue is that China tends to get crunched to numbers, making for a one-dimensional assessment. Columnists add a dimension by discussing China in terms of China-versus-America, commenting on the subject as though it were a football game (“China cuts America’s lead to 14; fourth quarter coming up”). Worst of all is the proclivity to conflate China with Asia. The continent is sometimes presented as a kind of club, with all members on the same page and China as its chair. But this “club” contains 48 highly diverse constituent parts that don’t like each other very much.

But even upgrading your information source mightn’t result in good intelligence. The China debate is divisive and bias eclipses clarity. Yes, there are Sinophobes, but they aren’t as informed, persistent, or articulate as Sinophiles. China has always had ardent and ambitious non-Chinese supporters, passionate individuals who often pass into history as determined embellishers. China is exceptional, impossible to explain, Sinophiles say—unless they are the ones explaining it.

Martin Jacques is the most recognizable Sinophile these days. The author of When China Rules the World, Jacques preaches that China’s economic influence will translate to the exportation of its culture and values. China will dominate because it’s a civilization state and racially unique. But all nations are racially unique, and there is no such thing as a civilization state.

In a sense, Jacques’s views epitomize the China debate: they have the veneer of substance and sophistication, but are intellectually bankrupt. The writer’s ideas have been attractively bound, expressed in crisp academic prose, supported by statistics, graphs, and pie-charts, but they only shore up a thesis that is completely theoretical, and China just isn’t a very theoretical place.

“There are no facts, only interpretations,” Nietzsche wrote. It is this observer’s interpretation that in the China debate, too many interpretations are superficial.

Troy Parfitt is a freelance journalist and the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World.