Anybody who talks regularly to Chinese officials will be familiar with the mantra that “China is a developing country”. But Shanghai, which I visited last week, mocks this modest description. With its eight-lane highways, its modern and efficient subway, its forest of neon-lit skyscrapers, giant new airport and chic hotels, China’s commercial capital is defiantly developed.

Of course, the city has pockets of poverty. And Shanghai is not China, where 150m people (out of a total Chinese population of more than 1.3bn) still live on less than $2 a day. Even so, China’s insistence that it is a poor, developing nation is beginning to wear a little thin. This, after all, is a country that is sitting on more than $2,500bn worth of foreign reserves.

In important ways, China is now a rich nation. But its insistence that it is still a “developing country” has become a shield to protect itself against vital political and economic changes that matter profoundly to the rest of the world.