Nation 'not as powerful as some believe'

"China is not cutting edge. It is not setting the standards of innovation or creativity in hardly any product lines and in other fields either."

He has no doubt that China will go on to overtake the US to become the world's largest economy, predicting 2025 as to when this will happen in the book, but doesn't see it as that significant an event.

"If you read Goldman Sachs and others, they now say it could be 2020 but right now the Chinese economy is slowing down and the American economy is picking up. So that could push it back. You will always have to ask the qualitative question, however. Which country is setting the standard of innovation, creating the ideas and coming up with the technological ideas? Is it the US or China?"

In the 400 pages of his tightly argued book, Shambaugh leaves you in no doubt as to the answer to that question.

He clearly appears to be taking the polar opposite position to that of Martin Jacques, who in his best-selling book When China Rules The World: The End of the Western World and The Birth of a New Global Order, argued that China could represent modernity in the 21st century and not the US.

"I don't think we are all going to be driving round in Chinese automobiles, filling up our Chery cars at Sinopec stations and going to the cinema in the evening and seeing Chinese films and turning on our car radios and listening to CRI (China Radio International) on the way home from Chinese lessons at a Confucius Institute. I don't think the world is going in that direction."

Shambaugh insists his views are not as far apart from Jacques as may at first appear.

"I actually had a nice long chat with him in Hampstead (northwest London) in February about it. If you read his book, it doesn't quite make the argument of the title. We differ on some things but not about everything," he says.

Shambaugh, a high-profile Sinologist who is a regular on TV screens, began studying Chinese as an undergraduate in 1975.

He has studied at Nankai, Fudan and Peking universities in China and has been a visiting fellow at four Chinese academic institutions.

Before his current post in Washington, he was a reader at the School of Oriental & African Studies in London and was editor of The China Quarterly, the respected academic journal.

He says that China has to some extent been thrust into having to take a global role because of its unexpected economic success of the past 30 years.

"The rise has come much more quickly than even the Chinese expected, not to mention the rest of the world. They don't have experience in being a global actor or a global power.

"They are kind of feeling their way in those areas. There is a learning curve that is pretty steep," he says.

Questioning China's real achievements

Damping down the nation's rejuvenation

Some say China remains limited in its global role