The dubious raising of an eyebrow might be an understandable response when an intellectual decides to write a romance. That is the reaction Martin Jacques risks when he declares his new book a love story.
Any frivolous thoughts on When China Rules the World: the Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, are aborted, however, as Jacques weeps while he explains why the volume is 'driven by immense pain and passion'.
'It's dedicated to Hari, my wife, who died in Hong Kong. I started it before she died - when we moved there for her job, and where we had our son. But I couldn't get going on it until years later. Now, here it is,' says Jacques in Beijing.
It has taken the Guardian columnist and university lecturer 11 years to complete. The book asks readers if they can imagine the planet 'not being Western', then advises them to get used to the idea. Jacques argues that the age of universal European enlightenment and its nation-states is on the wane.
'Competing modernities' from the developing world will replace them, he says, with China - boasting a powerful political force and sense of racial ascendancy - the trailblazer.
'The Western world is over. If the calling card of the West has been aggression and conquest, China's will be its overweening superiority and the hierarchical mentality this has engendered,' he writes.
Race and racism have been preoccupations for the 63-year-old former editor of Marxism Today. Jacques is the widower linked to Hong Kong's first law against racial discrimination, passed by the Legislative Council last year.