Overseas workers central plank of the macro Chinese economic project

I don’t think so. But that is one of the conclusions you could extrapolate from this comprehensive look at the Chinese economic miracle.

This impressive reportage job took the authors to 26 countries and 500 interviews to investigate China’s silent army — its emigrants. It was first published in Spanish in 2011, and much of the authors’ research was done in 2010.

But in a note to this just published English edition, Cardenal and Araújo insist that the near global financial crisis and the Arab spring events have only strengthened their hypothesis — that the overseas Chinese are playing a vital role in an unstoppable economic world conquest by the eastern giant.

You may disagree with this strong editorial line. Even the sub-title, The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers, and Workers Who Are Remaking the World in Beijing’s Image, carries a 19th century Yellow Peril undertone.

Then again, the close-mouthedness of official China invites conspiracy theories. And many of the main conclusions reached in this book are inescapable, and in themselves, tremendously important for all of us.

Since 2001, Chinese exports accelerated from $510bn to more than $3 trillion.

We all depend on this Chinese economic growth to keep the global recession from slumping into global depression.

According to this version, China needs 8% growth per year just to maintain social stability within its borders, let alone maintain its major contribution to worldwide economic activity.

For this growth, China needs raw materials and markets. And it’s also an inescapable conclusion that China facilitates emigration to ease unemployment.

The hypothesis here is that we are seeing a second phase of Chinese conquest, by entry into overseas markets to guarantee natural resources, markets and alliances for Chinese industry.

It may be alarmist, but with no free press or civil society in China to question policy, this look at their grand planning is welcome. And it provides a timely highlight of Chinese’s often blind eye to the environment, not just at home but overseas.

Chinese companies invested an estimated $460bn globally from 2005 to 2012, $340bn of it in underdeveloped countries, with China overtaking the World Bank as the world’s primary financier.

Surprise, surprise! A leading economic power is flexing its muscles on the world stage. But it seems they are doing so in a less obvious way than previous economic colonisers.

Often, Chinese industry fills the gap in countries sanctioned by the west and the UN. China takes huge advantage of western sanctions on Myanmar, while exploiting its timber, gold, and jade resources.

When UN sanctions were imposed on Sudan, in stepped China. Among other things, it supplies Sudan with arms — leaving Chinese soldiers in the country as UN peacekeepers coming under fire from Chinese weapons. The quid pro quo — again, oil to keep the Chinese industrial giant motoring along.

China is building infrastructure in the Congo, even as its civil war of more than a decade rumbles on. The quid pro quo here in central Africa is a return estimated by Cardenal and Araújo at up to 20-fold, in the form of copper and cobalt from Congolese mines, worth at least 20 times what China “invests” there.

Maybe it’s just the Chinese way — rather than a fiendish plot to rule the world economically. After all, sharp business minds (who go to sanctioned, badly run, or bankrupt countries because that is where the best business bargains are) are one of the qualities the authors find everywhere among the 35m of Chinese ethnicity around the world.

There’s also ambition, hard work, thriftiness — from the 15,000 door-to-door salespeople in Egypt, to Argentina’s 8,900 Chinese supermarkets, owned by 12 families.

The search for the industrial resources they need, at the best price, takes the Chinese to war-torn or sanctioned countries. But they are increasingly looking for bargains also in once rich, western nations wounded by recession. Now China’s overseas holdings include Bordeaux chateaux, made-in-Italy fashions, UK and US properties, and a share in Thames Water. China has become the biggest foreign investor in Germany.

In the EU’s bailout countries, Chinese companies control the port of Piraeus in Greece, and are big players in electricity generation in Portugal.

The new Chinese strong man, Xi Jinping, preparing for his 10-year mandate as Chinas head of state, visited Ireland last year — but probably didn’t see anything worth investing in.

But it’s in neighbouring territories that China’s global ambitions are perhaps clearest. Russia’s far east, a vast territory populated by only four million Russians, has become dependent on Chinese imports. Cheap Chinese goods flood north, Siberian timber goes south.

New Chinese towns are sprouting in the border area with Kazakhstan, to accommodate the flood of Chinese commerce to this former Soviet republic. Consumer goods go west, some of Kazakhstan’s 1% of world gas reserves and 2% of world oil reserves go east.

What role do the staff at your local Chinese restaurant play? More than you think. Although expats were disowned by Beijing governments for much of the 20th century, the money they sent home helped to kick-start Chinese industrial development.

Now their cousins at home have taken up the slack. Sharp at business they may be, but the 1.3 billion Chinese savers who put away 40% of their earnings (they are among the world’s best savers) are themselves exploited by interest rates which lag Chinese inflation. Their money boosts the endless cash in China’s state capitalism coffers which — according to China’s Silent Army — now greases the wheels for worldwide diplomatic-economic infiltration.