'“You get this sense of a change, where China’s competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad.”

It’s also a far cry from the cheap “Made in China” goods that many Westerners have associated with the “workshop of the world” in the past, underscoring how much cash has been poured into upgrading China’s industrial processes.

Far from being focused on low-quality products, China is now viewed as a leader in rapidly-growing, high-value technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, drones and advanced robotics.

The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.

After visiting a string of factories, Jim Farley was left astonished by the technical innovations being packed into Chinese cars – from self-driving software to facial recognition.

“Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned in July.

“We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”'

Most westerners are in denial about the advantage Chinas mixed economy has over the crony capitalism of the west.