Edouard Prisse offers a bracing critique of the political and media assumptions that have underwritten Western approaches to China in the era of deep economic integration. Arguing that prevailing free-trade orthodoxies have accelerated China’s wealth accumulation and strategic leverage, Prisse contends that the West has subsidized a rival’s rise while misreading the long-term consequences for its own economic and political autonomy.

Moving across policy choices, press narratives, and influential commentary, the book catalogs the errors, illusions, and confident but unfounded predictions that shaped public understanding, and asks how elite consensus formed and persisted even as warning signs mounted. Prisse also examines claims of organized, covert influence and misinformation efforts designed to blur the risks posed by China’s expanding power, raising pointed questions about information environments, institutional incentives, and the production of “common sense” in foreign economic policy.

Serious in its stakes yet deliberately accessible in style, the book invites scholars and general readers alike to reconsider what the West thought it knew about globalization, and what those assumptions may have cost.