After a great deal of time spent trave龐大的規(guī)模有可能妨礙中國的增長，但也會帶來巨大的優(yōu)勢。lling in China, reading about China and thinking deep thoughts about China, I have come to the conclusion that the most profound thing one can say about it is this: China is exceedingly big. This may seem like an awfully trite observation and, frankly, a terrible waste of the Financial Times’ money. But China’s sheer size helps to explain much about the country, from its impact on global commodity markets to the fact that one of the world’s poorest countries is now routinely mentioned in the same breath as the (still) mighty US. El Salvador, a nation with roughly the same standard of living as China, barely gets a look-in.

China’s 1.3bn multiplier effect makes almost everything it does seem extravagantly important. In some cases, its scale changes the very nature of the obstacles that confront it and the opportunities it can create.

China’s size is sometimes a distinct drawback. Take the controversy over the renminbi and China’s trade surplus with the US. In fact, China’s path to economic take-off has been fairly standard. Like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan before it, it has relied on external demand to kick-start industrialisation, bending the rules in its favour when that has suited its development needs. But unlike those countries, it has been “found out” much earlier. By the time Japan was causing serious trade friction with the US in the 1980s, it had all but caught up with western living standards. China is provoking anger on Capitol Hill at a time when its per capita income, even on a purchasing power parity basis, is just one-seventh of US levels. If only China were a 10th the size, no one would even have noticed the level of its (non-convertible) currency.