When Huawei’s new handset manufacturing complex opens in 2016 at Songshan Lake in southern China, it will include a building modelled on Krakow’s Wawel Castle. The former Polish royal residence was preferred over proposals based on other European beauty spots including the palace of Versailles, Granada’s Alhambra and Windermere in the English Lake District. That a fast-growing telecoms group should draw inspiration for the next phase of its assault on the 21st-century global phone market from a 16th-century castle is not as strange as it sounds.

Since the 1980s, Huawei, Haier, the white goods maker, and other fast-growing aspiring multinationals have been studying best practice, giving it a Chinese twist and then using it to compete against the international companies that developed it. The fact they are using management architecture from the US, Europe and Japan does, however, raise the question of whether China can develop its own management style.

Peter Drucker, the business thinker, thought it could and would. In 1997, he forecast China would be a source of abundant new managerial insights just as Japanese techniques had revolutionised global manufacturing in the 1980s. I’d go further: I think a population of 1.3bn must eventually yield not just management innovation but a Chinese heir to Drucker himself. So far, though, there are only faint signs of either.