A few evenings ago, I had dinner with the Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee. He told me about an interesting dystopian sci-fi novel, Folding Beijing, which was translated into English recently and promptly won the Hugo Award for best novelette. The book is about an overcrowded and strictly class-divided capital city in which “first-tier” residents enjoy a normal 24-hour day, and second- and third-tier citizens have to split another 24-hour period between them, with the unfortunate lower 50m living in a way that is nasty, brutish, and — quite literally — short.

Why do I mention this? Because I have been thinking a lot about how the major economic vectors of our time — technology-driven job destruction, wage stagnation, and political polarisation — will play out in both the US and China over the next few years. Lee, who helped launch Google in China and has invested in many of the country’s top start-ups, made a strong case that the Chinese were better positioned for the 21st century digital economy than America because the government could, as Mark Zuckerberg would put it, move fast and break things.

Already, the Chinese are plowing ahead with mass data gathering in smart cities; citizens' privacy will of course suffer but the algorithms will be richer as a result. Stem cell ethics? What stem cell ethics? China’s massive consumer market and its continued growth potential will make it possible to develop a digital ecosystem that might exist quite profitability and independently from the West, with home grown brands like Xiaomi and Huawei already connecting the dots up through the digital supply chain to the consumer.