Business: When Lord George Macartney, the envoy of Britain's King George III, arrived at the Qing dynasty court in 1793, he brought telescopes, a planetarium, guns, swords, a carriage and other toys to impress Emperor Qianlong.
Macartney, born in Lissanoure, Co Antrim and a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, famously refused to kowtow in the usual way to the emperor and then, incredibly, started to issue ultimatums to the court.
The emperor, unimpressed by Macartney's trinkets, send the envoy back to King George with a note saying China did not have "the slightest need of your country's manufactures". It's a famous yarn, often cited as an example of how difficult it is to do business in China and as an analogy of how China has been closed to outsiders for so many years, most recently from 1949 until the 1970s.
James Kynge succeeded in getting into China back in the 1980s and has watched the country like a hawk since then. Now publisher Pearson's point man in China, Kynge was the Financial Times's bureau chief in Beijing for seven years, after cutting his teeth while studying in Shandong province in 1982, shortly after China began to open up.
He includes the well-documented Macartney incident in his accomplished new book, China Shakes the World, but crucially, the reason he mentions it is to knock back the clichéd image of China as an inscrutable, perverse place and his next paragraph shows how this book consistently transcends the banal when discussing China:
It is less well known what Macartney confided in his diary on a melancholy voyage back home. It was "futile", he wrote, for the Chinese to resist British goals of opening up China trade because that was tantamount to trying to "arrest the progress of human knowledge".
There are a lot of China books doing the rounds, ranging from "how-to-do-business in the biggest potential market in the world" guides to travel books to earnest, horrifying memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, to the "whither China?" books asking where all of this is leading.
China Shakes the World is a business book, but one with a strongly beating human heart, and it's a splendid introduction to what is happening in, and to, China today. What Kynge brings to the subject is a real passion fuelled by his years living there, which has also given him a depth and sophistication that few other China books can match.
The book is too short, and you feel Kynge has a lot more to say on the subject, but its brevity makes for an easy read. Kynge loves the people.
He has real sympathy for the Chinese, who want the same thing that Americans and Europeans want - a car, a house, education for their kids and access to consumer goods. But he acknowledges that the sheer numbers involved means this is impossible: "The chances that the Chinese will one day be able to consume at the same rate as Americans do today are close to zero . . . the world does not have the resources to cater for 1.3 billion Chinese behaving like Americans," he writes.
The China that Kynge tells of is a busy, ambitious place but he digs into his knowledge of Old China to gain insight into the "Hungry Nation" of the title. When he started looking at China, it was of interest to a handful of sinologists and of course the Chinese themselves, "but since China has become an inescapable global force, the glaring mismatch between its political and economic polities has become an issue not just for Beijing but also for Washington, Tokyo, Brussels, London and other national capitals". China changes so quickly, that keeping a book current is a job indeed.
There are a lot of facts in this book, but statistics age quickly. It's the powerful way Kynge wields these statistics that stands out, making the connection between the fact that cows in the EU receive a subsidy of more than €1.60 a day, which is more than the average daily income of 700 million Chinese people.
There is a common thread running through the book of people still reeling from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, the period of Mao Zedong-inspired ideological fundamentalism which ended 30 years ago.
In one chapter, Kynge stands outside a Wal-Mart in Rockford, Illinois, asking shoppers if they feel like saying "thank-you" to Chinese workers for reducing the price of their shopping. "But only one or two people had a couple of words of gratitude," he writes.
He's not surprised, but he is disappointed.
• Clifford Coonan writes about China for The Irish Times and is based in Beijing
• China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation By James Kynge Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 244pp. £12.99
