The multi-faceted story of China growth has been told in many ways.
Some see it as China Inc, the world's most successful mercantilist state, expanding at the rest of the world's expense. Another version features a rising revisionist power seeking to remake the global system in its own image. Yet another casts it as a retrograde political outsider, emboldened by economic steroids, that is doomed to suffer a systemic implosion.
None of them gets it exactly right, argues Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science professor Edward Steinfeld.
The China story he tells is bold, counterintuitive and has an unfashionably rosy tinge. Here is a country that 20 years ago took a great leap of faith by hitching its fate to a global economic system designed and dominated by the advanced Western countries. Then it grew up, not by conjuring up its own rules, but instead by absorbing - and even embracing as its own - norms, practices, values and aspirations of the West.
'In essence, China today - a country at the peak of its modernisation revolution - is doing something it historically never really did before. It is playing our game,' says Steinfeld, who directs the MIT Sloan China Management Project.
In his new book Playing Our Game: Why China's Rise Doesn't Threaten the West, Steinfeld sets out to challenge two views expressed by nearly all China worriers, China bashers and China doomsayers: that a rising China poses a global threat and that growth abnormalities - in the form of a dangerous disconnect between political and economic transformation - have become grossly manifest.
