It’s all a bit odd when Communist China is left to defend the free market while the United States and Australia, among others, are preaching the virtues of what was once known as protectionism.

That, at least, is how it appears at first blush, especially when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen travelled to China to protest it flooding the world with cheap solar panels or, as she put it, to “underscore the global economic consequences of Chinese industrial overcapacity”.