We are witnessing the ascendance of a superpower through prodigious mercantile and technological influence

A few months ago, I stumbled across a line in a business title that stopped me in my tracks: at that point, 15 Chinese startups had reached unicorn status that year alone; effectively, 30 per cent of the world’s billion-dollar companies were created in China in 2017.

The relentless nature of a news cycle dominated by the commotion of Trump and Brexit has served to mask the potent undertow of what is likely to prove the most significant shift of this century – namely, the transfer of global power from the west to China. As political turmoil transpires elsewhere, China is re-shaping the world around trade, economics and technology, placing itself firmly at the centre.

While US infrastructure continues to age, and initiatives in Europe such as HS2 become mired in complex procedures and delays – a consequence of democracy’s messy complexity – China’s one-party system means that it can plan projects on a scale barely imaginable in the west and can plan generations ahead – its $124 billion “belt and road” project is planned to extend from its eastern border to the English Channel. Yet this is the same authoritarian regime that maintains the country in isolation behind a firewall.

China’s long-term strategy means that it could lead the world in technologies such as machine learning (in July, its government published a roadmap for AI with ambitious targets up to 2030), the blockchain (which plays to China’s significant geopolitical advantages), and energy, in which the Chinese are assuming leadership in the deployment of electric vehicles and the manufacture of solar panels.