In 2009 China launched probably the biggest ever peacetime stimulus, issuing debt to fund an investment programme amounting to 12.5 per cent of gross domestic product. It aimed to offset the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis, which had clobbered the country’s export markets and thrown tens of millions of workers out of their jobs within a few months.

China’s actions then spurred a recovery in emerging markets that eventually helped restore the world’s economic equilibrium. But, as a Financial Times series has highlighted, the debts incurred now rank as Beijing’s greatest economic frailty. Its ratio of gross debt to GDP surged from about 171 per cent before the crisis to 299 per cent this year, according to the Institute of International Finance. This ratio is not high by developed country standards, although among emerging markets it is an outlier. China’s real frailty resides not so much in the overall size of its debt load as in its distribution.

Its corporate sector is the world’s most indebted, and its most highly leveraged. A huge and loosely regulated shadow finance system conceals eruptive risks. Small and medium-sized banks, which have doubled in size over the past decade to account for 43 per cent of total banking assets, are riddled with risky funding models and a few have already had to be bailed out.