Even otherwise sensible Americans are “recalibrating” where they stand as they tack ever closer to a darker view of China. More sophisticated counterviews tend to come from scholars and journalists in the Asia-Pacific region itself. Living much closer to the awakened giant, they have a lot at stake and know they must get it right.

Kishore Mahbubani, the first dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a former Singapore ambassador to the UN, is the author of a bookshelf of original, feisty thinking about China, the US and Asia. He can be brutally blunt, and is ever ready to prick Western hot-air balloons.

Though denounced as anti-American by some, he offers unconventional deep thinking about our future, into which the younger generation is about to be pushed.

US’ Taipei Act is a needless provocation aimed at China

Professor Mahbubani’s latest work, Has China Won?, is comprehensive in its overview of East-West relations. But it is still, thankfully, deeply irreverent. Its timing is problematic, though, landing as it does on the glacier of a glum US-China relationship.

With China shoved in our face like a doppelgänger of the former Soviet Union, the US political establishment conjures up a recycling of the intellectual ghost of George Kennan, who articulated the idea of “containment” as the strategy most likely to prove effective given the Soviet hulk.

In explicating China’s rise, there’s more than a touch of Hegelian-style inevitability, but no trace of Marxism. A product of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, with its bespoke city state capitalism, the scholar is hardly pro-Communist but openly pro-Chinese.

Is Xi’s China becoming as out of touch with reality as the Qing court?

For him, China’s life force is anything but communistic and is all about being Chinese. As he writes: “Unlike the Soviet Communist Party, [the Chinese Communist Party] is not riding on an ideological wave; it is riding the wave of a resurgent civilisation … the strongest and most resilient civilisations in history.”

And so, maybe now is the right time for more people like Mahbubani. For if, perhaps, we can accept China at its worst, we will be better able to appreciate China when at its best.

How often do we come across a writer who revels in discomforting truth-telling and yet still provides a sense of comfort due to his clarity of vision as to where we might be headed? Mahbubani is, I believe, on the right side of history.

University professor and journalist Tom Plate is the distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University and vice-president of the Pacific Century Institute. His most recent book on China and the US is titled Yo-Yo Diplomacy