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Arthur R. Kroeber [Photo provided to China Daily]

Arthur R. Kroeber believes the debate about the Chinese economy is almost always polarized.

The founding partner and head of research of Gavekal Dragonomics, a Beijing research firm, and author of a new book, China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, says as a result it is difficult to get the true picture.

"I think the biggest mistake, in general, is that people always think you can reduce China to one thing - it's good, it's bad, it is going to take over the world or it is going to collapse tomorrow," he says.

Kroeber, 54, spoke to China Daily in a meeting room of his company, which he helped establish at the Soho Nexus Center in 2002.

His book, published by Oxford University Press in April, is timely with huge international interest now in the Chinese economy, which intensified at the start of the year with a renewed bout of stock market volatility, which has recently abated.

"That is kind of good luck, I have to say. This project actually originated a couple of years ago. I was often asked by clients whether there was one book they could read to give them the basic facts about the Chinese economy. I never could come up with one," he says.

"There are obviously some dense academic tomes, which are quite good, but not very accessible to an ordinary reader and particularly not to the kind of business reader who wants a quick scan. So there was kind of gap in the market," he adds.

But his book of 319 pages, although an interesting read, is in no way just a beginner's guide. It is a genuine examination of the issues facing the country's economy from reform and opening-up in the late 1970s to today's many policy dilemmas.

"The problem is that people try to simplify China into one narrow storyline, which they would never think of doing, for example, with the United States, or any other large, complex economy," he says.

Kroeber, who grew up in an academic family in New York and is the grandson of Alfred L. Kroeber, a highly influential anthropologist, did not want to get into academia himself. After studying comparative religion at Harvard University, he became a freelance journalist, eventually coming to Beijing and starting the consultancy.

"I swore when I left college (that) I would never go to graduate school. Although I kept to that promise, I've wound up relocating many aspects of academic life in my professional career."

He says economics is also a subject that he reluctantly came to.

"I swore I would never do business journalism but I wound up in India doing freelance reporting. And I quickly came to realize you couldn't understand politics or the social environment unless you had an understanding of what the economic motivations of people were."

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