Should we feel threatened by the rise of China? The relentless progress of what my colleague Martin Wolf describes as the world's largest ant colony is giddying. Exports from China have risen by almost half in the past year, causing a political stink in Washington, while Chinese workers are reminding their employers, and rulers, that cheap Chinese labour cannot be taken for granted. China has a habit of outrunning any superlative we can apply to the place. (The statistics about China I included in my book The Undercover Economist – published in 2005 – have been shredded by the pace of Chinese growth.)

Philippe Legrain's new book Aftershock reports the most eye-catching statistic about China I have seen for a while: that China now exports every six hours as much as it did in the whole of 1978. Consumers have enjoyed cheaper goods, but now that businesses across the world have to compete with the “China price”, it's hard not to feel nervous about this new economic superpower.

China is also a business opportunity, of course. Peter Mandelson once cited a 19th-century commentator who remarked that “if everyone in China lengthened their shirt tails by a foot, the textile mills of England would spin for a year”. At a recent gathering of business leaders in Manchester, that 19th-century sentiment was going strong. These entrepreneurs were worried about the slump and the tight purse strings of the banks – but about China? Never: China was viewed as one big opportunity, even if shirt tails no longer top the list of Mancunian exports.