One result of China's inexorable rise is the growing number of people who claim the country's progress as vindication of their own ideas. In some quarters on the right, China is welcomed as the latest convert to the capitalist club. To listen to many multinational executives talk about the dynamism of China's economy is to hear a professor describing a new student who will one day take over the class.

On the left, there are writers who hold up China as an example of a developing country that has shunned the rigid prescriptions of "neo-liberal" economics, while others hope the rise of China (and India) will usher in a more multilateral world that demolishes US hegemony. Some still hope China will forge a new kind of society with less social inequality and environmental damage than Europe or the US have managed. Giovanni Arrighi, sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, brings all three of these views together in his new book, Adam Smith in Beijing.

Arrighi is a student of the French historian Fernand Braudel, and the book has the range and ambition of Braudel's work. He starts with Adam Smith, who, he argues, believed in a state strong enough to regulate the market and would have abhorred the economic "shock therapies" of the 1980s and 1990s.

After lengthy discussions of capitalist development, Arrighi moves to east Asia, which, he says, has enjoyed a more socially equitable development path and a system of diplomacy that avoided many of the wars that Europe suffered.

All of this leads to his finale about the spectacular advance of China over the past two decades, which he believes could help usher in "a new global order … respectful of political and cultural differences". Detailing the big increases in higher education and job creation together with the reduction in poverty, Arrighi puts the emphasis much less on China's openness to trade and investment than on the gradual approach to economic reform. "The neo-liberal creed in the benefits of shock therapy and minimalist government has been as alien to Chinese reformers as it was to Adam Smith," he concludes.

Yet China's development has been much more uneven, and in the last 20 pages of his book Arrighi picks some large holes in his own conclusions. In recent years, China has seen a surge in inequality and sharp increases in social unrest, often because of exploitation by factory owners or theft of land by officials. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese state stopped paying for large parts of healthcare and basic education, while many countries in Latin America that Arrighi slams for following the "neo-liberal" path now spend almost twice as much of their GDP on health and education as China.

Growth has also created an explosion in pollution that is having a huge impact. As Arrighi admits, China is far from "an ecologically sustainable development path". But he is right to say the response to these problems is hugely important "not just to Chinese society but to world society".

Sheila Melvin's The Little Red Book of China Business is based on an idea that might have made an entertaining magazine article but cannot sustain a book. The basic thesis is that Mao Zedong is central not just to modern Chinese history, but also to doing business today. Melvin mixes biography and personal observation as a consultant and lobbyist to draw eight lessons about the China market. "With a working knowledge of Mao's thinking, strategies and tactics you will be better able to navigate the Chinese system," she writes.

The approach works when explaining how Mao was able to exploit the sense of victimhood that the Chinese feel over 19th-century imperial incursions - an emotion that can still be harnessed today against foreign companies. She has useful tips, based on insights from Mao, on how to get the government on your side and how to negotiate.

Yet an interesting theory can be stretched too far. As a young man he may have been a good motivator, but the last thing to be said about Mao is that he is a model for human-resources management, as one of the eight lessons contends. And he is an unfortunate inspiration for a chapter entitled "Resist Dogmatism". As Melvin admits, Mao was often a "good teacher by negative example".

Geoff Dyer is the FT's Shanghai correspondent

Adam Smith in BeijingBy Giovanni ArrighiVerso £25, 420 pagesFT bookshop price: £20

The Little Red Book of China Business: Chairman Mao's Secrets for Business SuccessBy Sheila MelvinPiatkus £12.99, 226 pagesFT bookshop price: £10.39