From left: Marysia Juszczakiewicz, founder of Peony Literary Agency; Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University; and Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World. Photos Provided to China Daily

Books on China have been growing in popularity since the early 2000s. One of the most famous, or infamous, Gordon Chang's 2001 title The Coming Collapse of China, sold well despite it soon becoming clear that the book's central assertion was deeply flawed.

Chang has remained bullish, republishing the book earlier this year arguing that his initial claim was not incorrect, but that he had the timing slightly wrong. He declined to comment for this article.

There is a sense that such "all or nothing" claims about China are often the result of pressure from publishers to produce provocative titles that will sell. There is a danger that this process might skew the debate.

"In general, I think that too much of the writing about China is shaped by what have been termed Sinomania and Sinophobia," says Jonathan Fenby, an author and journalist who has written a number of books on China.

"On the one hand we have writers predicting the coming collapse of China and on the other foreseeing the inevitability of China ruling the world. Such predictions are beguiling, especially if they are pitched in headline-grabbing terms."

Jonathan Holslag, from the Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies, agrees that popular books on China tend to sensationalize the issue.

"Across the board publishers that aim at large audiences require manuscripts to be counterintuitive or sensational," Holslag says. "If you want to get into the big bookshops there's no way around it.

"There is a wide range of very sophisticated pieces of research on China, but unfortunately they do not make it as best-sellers."

Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing and author of Ancient Thought, Chinese Modern Power, says books about China written by Westerners can often lack substance and be misleading.

"Most foreigners try to understand China from their knowledge of their own country. I am not saying this is necessarily wrong since it is quite normal. Chinese scholars, in fact, try to understand the United States from their Chinese perspective. It can lead to a lot of misunderstandings, however," he says.

"With China, however, you have a vast country with a special culture and with a history and problems not experienced by any other foreign country. There is a strong argument therefore that only the Chinese understand these problems and how to solve them. That is the essential difficulty between someone like me and Western experts."