“How was China?” everyone asked last week when I pitched up at home bleary-eyed after an overnight flight. In reply, I found myself repeating the line from Noel Coward’s play Private Lives. “Very big, China.”

This was not an especially impressive insight given that I’d just spent six fabulous days swanking around Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Neither was it something I’d learnt from being there. When you are whisked round from flight to car, distance ceases to mean much.

In accepting the invitation to go on a debating tour, I had expected to return with a mind full of management ideas and a suitcase full of rip-off handbags. The former, I was sure, would be as plentiful as the latter: you can’t have an economic miracle on the scale of China without producing the odd management lesson that other countries can learn from.