In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 will be the year of the fire monkey, which is supposed to bring great risks to business and the economy. Even the atheist Chinese Communist party should take heed of this celestial warning. In purchasing power terms the Chinese economy has overtaken that of the US and is now the world’s biggest following decades of spectacular growth. But it is also growing at its slowest pace since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

It is now abundantly clear to even the most bullish observers that China’s investment-reliant, credit-fuelled, export-heavy, low-cost manufacturing growth model has run its course. The optimists point out that thanks to the magic of compound growth, an expansion of 5.6 per cent in the next five years would be equal to 8.6 per cent over the past five years and 11 per cent in the past decade. They also point to evidence of a long-awaited shift from manufacturing and heavy industry to services and consumption as Chinese growth starts to rely less on mining and more on dining. Closer inspection of the data provides a more worrying picture.

Most of the growth in the service sector since 2014 has been in real estate and financial services — in other words, the real economy continues to slow even as monetary policy easing has inflated new asset bubbles. In 2015 the Shanghai stock market doubled in size before a spectacular collapse over the summer. The Chinese leadership, long credited with otherworldly powers of economic management, first cheered the bubble on the way up and then tried to defy market gravity by criminalising share sales, imposing trading restrictions and embarking on a massive share-buying programme.