President Obama stood at a “town hall” meeting in Shanghai, fielding questions from eager Chinese students, an American leader demonstrating the give-and-take of democracy to a nation under one-party rule. Except that the students were mainly members of the Communist Youth League, hand-picked by the Chinese Communist Party, and the first question set the tone: “What measures will you take to deepen this close relationship between cities of the United States and China?”

All in all, the “town hall” exemplified the sort of stagecraft that the Chinese seem to specialise in — managed in a way that is so obvious as to be condescending, but still successful at stifling dissent.

The moment reminded me of why I decided, three years ago, to centre my second spy novel, The Ghost War, on a conflict between the United States and China.

For novelists, China’s rise is pure gold. The Communist Party’s opacity and its passion to control China’s image have had the opposite effect: they feed Western fears of China’s intentions, and dare Western thriller writers to invent disaster.

Never mind that so far the Chinese have not projected military power outside of East Asia, that they prefer to compete mainly by accumulating dollars by the trillion. Military power grows from economic strength, and military analysts do not doubt that the People’s Republic could one day become a full-bore competitor to the United States, offering its protection to all manner of governments throughout the Persian Gulf and Africa.

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