If you think politicians have thick hides, that they never learn from the past or from their mistakes you'd have to similarly compliment economists. Ask any six economists their views on an economy and you'll likely hear 12 opinions.

Economists are a dime a dozen, and their analysis, much less their forecasting skills, are simply dismal. Not hard to figure why though: they've had their heads buried in the dismal science too long that one wonders what's so scientific about what economists really do. Perhaps it's the tea-leaves they keep reading after every cuppa.

Rewind to pre-1997 Asia. Economists were gung-ho about Asia then, with ever-positive forecasts coming out of their pores. And recall the truckload of books, magazines and newspapers that also sang the praises of an Asia-on-the-march, an Asia unstoppable, the Asian century, and all that jazz. Remember Jim Rohwer's deferential Asia Rising (1995)? Rohwer, former chief economist for SC First Boston, subtitled his book How history's biggest middle class will change the world. Rohwer wasn't alone: just about everybody worth two-bob wrote on the brilliant rise of Asia transformed from rice fields to fields of modern industrial capitalism. Par excellence.

All these books had a single common theme: How capitalism cut a swathe across the region to why the West should adopt the Asian economic 'model'. Besides the usual hype, here's one for posterity from Rohwer: How to break the paralysis of special-interest politics by keeping government small and focused on things it does best while leaving the rest to families and societies as a whole. And they droned on and on and on. Not sure if Rohwer wrote his treatise from the glitzy and comfortable towers of Hong Kong or deep in the bowels of Asian capitalism.

Quite unlike former journalist James Clad, then of the Hong Kong-based the Far Eastern Economic Review, whose book Business, Money and Power in Southeast Asia detailed the dark underbelly of Asian capitalism the corruption, the nepotism, the cronyism. But Clad was quickly rubbished by a mob of so-called Marxist academics, who had installed themselves in the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, as a heretical, un-reconstructed dependency theorist. But wait: it gets better.

By early to mid 1997 Asia's miracle economies crashed like paper dummies. Tsunamied, they were, by their own shenanigans over economic governance or lack thereof. Amid the crisis came yet another truckload of books on how the Asian economies were stir-fried, then just fried altogether. Save for China and India. The advertising dollar collapsed and some top-flight magazines were also fried out of the market Asiaweek to start, then the Far Eastern Economic Review. Newspapers too reeled from the economic crisis and many are still recovering from Asia's self-made disaster.

Until now.

It's the good times again

Because today, another truckload of books has come to market and bearing old gifts. Here's a sample of the titles you'll find in major bookstores in your neck of the woods: Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, by Clyde Prestowitz; Regional Powerhouse: The Greater Pearl River Delta and the Rise of China, by Michael J. Enright, Edith E. Scott and Ka-mun Chang; Made in China: What Western Managers Can Learn from Trailblazing Chinese Entrepeneurs, by Donald N. Sull with Yong Wang.

It's the good old times in Asia again. The great crash of Asia is these days nothing more than a zit that can be easily hidden. Makeup has advanced with technology. So, too, has the art of the makeover, so making real reforms not a buzzword but a dirty word.

By any measure, these new books triumphant a common theme: Asian capitalism is back with a vengeance. So has the glitz. And I'll bet before too long, so will the other philosophical baloney treatises like The Asian Renaissance, Can Asians Think? and a genre by Asia's Western and even its own apologists on Asian values mostly of hubristic value. But there's one other common theme in the truckload of new books coming to market, and they don't seem too concerned with all of Asia; just one part of the region. You guessed it: China.

There was a time and place for Japan, but it's about as popular these days as Southeast Asia's one-time 'tiger' economies. Like it or not, the flavour of China has been the flavour of the last decade. Japan's biggest companies once housing production operations for re-export to the world market have been slowly winding down business in Southeast Asia. They're more focused on the China economy. Even Southeast Asian capitalists have hitched their wagons to the great China promise of untold wealth and power. And popular wisdom says the Asian century is pass. The only century to be made arguably unstoppably is China's.

That's not going to please the neo-conservative hawks in the George W Bush White House. Americans have been touchy on just about everything which may undermine their global superiority. Even if something doesn't exist, they'll dream it up. Just like the economists. Take Clyde Prestowitz a nice enough fellow but an iffy economist. And like most economists, he's easily swayed towards jingoism.

America's fear, China's problems

Not so long ago, Americans were worried that their technology jobs, especially in services like call centres, were being outsourced to places like India. It's still happening. But the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the indisputable dogmatist who has been propagating the cult of globalisation, says all's fair in love and war in global economics. Not that ordinary working Americans could've done anything to halt their jobs being exported to India. Now, though, Prestowitz has emerged with the same calling card.

He says China's growing domination of global manufacturing and India's booming IT services sector have led to skilled jobs being shed in the West for the East. Why? Because of falling standards in American schools and government laissez-faireism, which are costing America its position as a world centre for science and innovation. The US' trade imbalances alone has been thumping the US dollar every which way. Which can only mean, Prestowitz claims, that China's economic transformation India's too will sooner or later, more or less, see the demise of America and a looming global economic crisis. Before you get too cosy with Prestowitz's jingoism, note that his economic argument is about as wonky as his political argument.

It wasn't so long ago before the Japanese economic juggernaut crashed and burned when its financial bubble burst in 1989 that the likes of Prestowitz and others in the Washington special-interest lobby group and the so-called intellectual establishments, were brandishing the same scare-mongering about Japanese capitalism, which they said was about to rub out American capitalism for world supremacy. American senators bless their ignorant soul ran amok. In true John Wayne style, they publicly thrashed Japanese television sets for the benefit of their political self-interest. But what has happened since then?

Japan's still mired in its own 1980s financial binge even when things were going hopeless wrong while the yen rose and rose against the greenback. The Japan bogey in the US is dead but we have a new economic bogey: China. But for how long? If you believe the latest truckload of American-inspired jingoism over the spread of mainland China capitalism forever.

But don't hold your breath, because there are many and ever-widening crevices in China's financial system to sink that economy faster than the Titanic did. And President Hu Jintao hasn't a clue about how to fix the problem any more than he has the power to crack down on China's rampant scourge of corruption, nepotism and cronyism that runs all the way to the top of the Chinese government.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.