Even as Beijing announces the latest “mini-stimulus”, it should be clear that Chinese economic growth is far from having bottomed out. Over the next few years, the world’s second-biggest economy will slow to well below current expectations of 6-7 per cent. While most analysts believe that slower growth in gross domestic product must unleash social unrest, they may be focusing on the wrong numbers.

Simple logic shows that it is nearly impossible for China’s GDP to grow at current rates while rebalancing away from its dangerous over-reliance on exports and debt-fuelled investment. Consider what it means for China to rebalance. Household consumption, at an astonishingly low 35 per cent of GDP, is just over half the global average.

Attempts to engineer a rebalancing that lifts consumption over the next 10 years to, say, 50 per cent – which will still leave it with the lowest consumption share of any large economy in the world – would require consumption growth to exceed GDP growth by close to 4 percentage points every year. So an average annual GDP growth rate of 6 or 7 per cent requires average growth in consumption of nearly 10-11 per cent for a decade for China to rebalance meaningfully.