China’s growth slowed to 6.5 per cent in the year to the third quarter, the slowest rate since the global financial crisis. Shock! Not! The slowdown does not suggest anything is wrong. It is insignificant in itself; the economy is still growing strongly. Above all, it is time the world stopped obsessing over China’s growth targets and focused on what matters: the quality and sustainability of China’s economic development.

Some might believe (or, in some quarters, hope) that the slowdown proves that the US-China trade war is biting. But this hypothesis is inconsistent with the evidence. The value of China’s exports, in US dollars, grew by 14.5 per cent in September, year on year. China also managed to achieve a record $34.1bn trade surplus with the US in that month. Conceivably, trade friction will bite in coming quarters. But it has definitely not done so yet.

The decline in the growth rate is, moreover, from 6.7 per cent in the year to the second quarter. Nobody would regard such a slight difference as significant in the case of another economy. No sensible person even believes China’s numbers are accurate to two-tenths of a percentage point. Above all, the growth rate, if correct, is still extremely healthy. If the Chinese government had not made such a fetish of its growth targets, nobody would care at all about this “slowdown”.