When former New Zealand prime minister Sir John Key was at dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping a few years ago, he had the chance to ask him a question that will shape geopolitics for the next few decades: what did Xi imagine China would look like in 30 or 40 years?

“The abridged version of the answer is, ‘Kind of a Singapore’,” Key recalls. That is, a modern economy driven in no small part by technology and research and development, which has managed to lift hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty and into the middle class.