A new bestseller in China, Currency Wars, published by a unit of the state-owned CITIC Group presents an elaborate conspiracy theory centred on the Rothschilds. The details can be read elsewhere - much of it will be familiar to those of us forced to trawl the lower reaches of the internet.

Any conspiracy theory that mentions the famous European-Jewish banking dynasty touches a raw nerve in the West, given its guilt over the complicity of a chunk of Europe in the attempted murder of a whole ethnic community, let alone the Roma, gays and as many Slavs as the German Army of the East could cope with. Cynically, some might even consider Chinese interest in this material (which is typically more associated with right-wing Japanese visions of the universe) as a pitch for emerging market hearts and minds, especially in the Middle East.

In fact, it appears that the Chinese have simply latched on to an existing conspiracy theory that we suspect they partly believe themselves without fully understanding why Westerners get so edgy about it. The worst that might be said is that 'conservative' policy-makers in Beijing thought that it might be quite useful to have author Mr. Song Hongbing's theories in the political marketplace to influence a domestic debate.

In our view, the propaganda war between East and West is in danger of getting out of hand but the West cannot whine too much. Nonsense from China is an understandable reaction to a great deal of similar nonsense that has emanated from Western (largely Israeli, French and Anglo-Saxon) ‘black operations’ over recent years – something about reaping and sowing is in order here but 'nuff said. In fact, Jewish reaction in the UK is mature. The (European) Jewish community recognizes that the Chinese in no way intend anti-semitism (unlike many Japanese versions of the myth) and that the Chinese admire Jewish acumen. Song Hongbing is explicit on this matter according to Wednesday's Financial Times report.

Closer analysis suggests that the book is important because it arrives at a point of tension within some serious economic policy debates inside China. There is a powerful higher-level lobby for opening up China to the global economy.  Throughout the emerging world, technically-trained elites are trying to integrate their countries into the global economy but are finding it hard to bring mid-level policy-makers and 'conservatives' along with them. Traditional nationalist sentiment, here as elsewhere, sees US pressure, in this case to float the renminbi and open up the financial system, as just another form of ‘looting’. The Western drive for political and economic liberalization is coming up against often legitimate national suspicions of the motives for reform.  It is for the West to let these countries work out for themselves where the benefit to them of global integration actually lies and if a 'nonsense' conspiracy theory contributes to bringing that debate into the open, then why not?  The Diana conspiracy theory brought into the open serious concerns about social modernisation in the UK in the late 1990s without causing the fall of a Monarchy that is now stronger than ever.

The author (basically a Chinese-American geek without formal historical training) seems to have put some web conspiracy material into a plausible framework. His work appeals to a widespread need for narratives that explain what is going on in the world where otherwise there is silence. Conspiracy theories fill gaps in official information and public education.

Professional history should be treated with caution.  The ‘evidence’ is not always what it appears to be and silences are meaningful too. Historians can be more or less fact-based mythmakers. That silences can be meaningful is a little too Zen-like for Oxbridge-trained minds to comprehend. The conservative English school represented by Andrew Roberts and others is 'good history' but it also presents a narrative with a purpose, a set of judgements about what it is important to write about, that has contributed to the formation of this generation's ideology as much as anything Marxist did to that of the 1960s. 

The post-modern attitude to truth easily moves from a situation based on narratives that conform to what facts are available to ones in which the gaps between facts are not ignored but are filled with increasingly imaginative surmise. At this stage, the balance between evidence and interpretation shifts. If the market does not need a new narrative, the narrative stays lurking in the lower swamps of the internet. If it does, then it gets integrated into a text (as author Song Hongbing has done with Currency Wars), published and distributed as ‘a truth’.

We should not get too scandalized or po-faced about this. There are cases where the narrative is an outrageous lie – the narrative of Holocaust Denial is the most obvious example of this and deeply hurtful to the victims of German national socialism.  Similarly, Japanese historiography has been wilfully neglectful of crimes against the Chinese people: but then so, until the last decade, has British about mass bombing and the conduct of Allied troops in Germany in 1945/1946. A new invented narrative might be regarded as a form of art that tells us some cultural truth that concentrates minds on the deeper stresses and strains in a society. For example, much of the conservative British school’s writing represents an ideology of Atlantic superiority and a repeated assertion of the vileness of other systems – with an often wilful refusal to engage with uncomfortable issues surrounding British conduct outside its heartland.

More could be written on this and we may return to the matter on another occasion – but Currency Wars should be seen not as an occasion for panic (as the sensible low key reaction of the Board of Deputies of British Jews has shown) but as an opportunity to ask questions about why this particular vision of the world is important at this time, how it may impact on serious policy debate (probably marginally) and how mass narratives are now constructed out of the internet instead of by often equally ideologically-committed professionals working in libraries.