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As China's economic growth has surged to astonishing levels in recent years, a matching wave of books chronicling its rise has poured from the presses of publishers in Europe and the U.S. Many of these tend to be rather breathless accounts of how China's boom is affecting its own people and the rest of the world—tales of human struggle and environmental destruction within the Middle Kingdom, or, elsewhere, of entire steel factories being crated up and shipped to the mainland along with tens of thousands of jobs. But a second broad classification of China books is now emerging. These attempt to explain what countries and individuals can do, or ought to do, in reaction to China's cataclysmic change.

A pair of prime examples is The China Fantasy by James Mann, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and The Writing on the Wall, by British journalist Will Hutton. The two volumes are both nominally about China, but their aims are to influence policy in the West. Their subtitles make that much clearer: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression gets second billing on Mann's book, while Hutton's subtitle is Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy.

The similarities end there. Mann's is a slim volume, an extended essay skewering what he sees as the hypocrisy of U.S. politicians in dealing with China. For the sake of maintaining good trading relations, Mann argues, American leaders have ignored the inconvenient fact that China is run by a repressive, sometimes brutal regime that stands against everything they profess to hold dear: democracy, human rights and freedom. They excuse this behavior with what he calls the "soothing scenario" that China will eventually come around to sharing their values, based on the assumption that democracy is a necessary byproduct of economic development. Mann calls this the "Starbucks fallacy," a reference to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's argument that when people have more choices of coffee than they do of leaders, political change is inevitable. But Mann sees a third way, a path between the advent of democracy and a collapse into chaos that is generally considered to be China's only alternative to political change. Twenty years from now, he says, China could still be as authoritarian as it is today. Far from ushering in democracy, it's possible that China's newly rich urban élite, with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, could keep its rural masses disenfranchised indefinitely. The U.S. needs to keep that scenario in mind when dealing with Beijing, Mann says—and not just assume everything will work out in the end.

Hutton's book is much more ambitious in scope, particularly for someone who is not a China specialist. (He is a former newspaper editor and author of books on economics and European and U.S. politics.) In 400 pages dense with facts and footnotes—his bibliography runs to 27 pages—Hutton sets out a detailed analysis of China's rise and of what Western nations must do to preserve a leading role in the face of it. His proposition is fairly simple, and pretty much diametrically opposed to Mann's. "If the next century is going to be Chinese," Hutton writes in his preface, "it will be only because China embraces the economic and political pluralism of the west." Beijing faces a host of woes ranging from pervasive corruption to a crippled banking system to the contradictions inherent in its combination of half-baked capitalism and single-party control. Without the adoption of democratic principles and institutions such as the rule of law, representative government and a free press, China's current path is unsustainable—in other words, it's democracy or bust. It is in the West's interest to encourage China's recognition of that fact, Hutton argues—and also to reaffirm its own commitment to those ideals.

The China Fantasy and The Writing on the Wall are penned by men who clearly feel passionately about their subject. Mann's book is a distillation of years of observations on the interaction between Beijing and Washington. On the other hand, while Hutton's research is prodigious, he seems to begin with a set of preconceived ideas, and makes clear in his acknowledgments that he took on this project at the urging of his agent, despite knowing very little about China. I'm inclined to agree with Mann on the likelihood of democracy evolving in China anytime soon: as long as the economic boom continues to raise living standards, many Chinese will be inclined to leave the current system—authoritarian as it may be—alone. There is a place in the world, of course, for inductive reasoning like Hutton's, and for fresh ideas presented by nonspecialists. But in this case I'll have to concur with a certain Hunanese poet and politician who advised that it was best to "seek truth from the facts."

• Simon Elegant