China is shifting its growth model to one relying more on consumption and less on investment. It is also urbanising, ageing and experiencing dynamic technological change. It should therefore offer the world’s businesses a gigantic, rapidly growing, but challenging, consumer market as it evolves from being the “workshop of the world”.

Already between 2007 and 2017, the aggregate size of Chinese household consumption rose from a mere 13 per cent of US levels to 34 per cent. Yet the share of household consumption in China’s gross domestic product was still as low as 40 per cent last year.

Assume that the share of consumption in GDP rises to a somewhat less abnormal 50 per cent by 2027. Assume, too, that the economies of China and the US grow in line with the latest forecasts of the International Monetary Fund up to 2023.