Residents of the city’s tower blocks have taken to expressing their discontent in song and have been met with drones urging them to stop and “curb your enthusiasm for freedom”.

It is China’s weaknesses, not her strengths that have caused this – there aren’t enough hospital beds, vaccinations among the elderly are low and the country’s Sinopharm vaccine is inferior to those in the West.

On top of this, a credit crisis threatens its property firms, a seemingly never-ending crackdown on private firms looks set to stifle innovation, and now, a severe misjudgment over sanctions on Russia has reignited risks of a technology war with America and a further chilling of relations with Europe.

While Europe is back at work, investment bank UBS says that among the 100 largest Chinese cities, eight, accounting for almost 9pc of economic output, had imposed some kind of residential lockdown and a third of cities were in some form of non-residential control.

Of course, lots of commentators have spilt lots of ink predicting the end of China’s economic miracle – probably almost as many who have proclaimed the ‘Middle Kingdom’ will never relinquish its status as the world’s biggest economy and that we were set for a return to the 1820s when it accounted for a third of global gross domestic product.

But at last week’s International Monetary Fund meeting the consequences of China’s response to Russia – or rather lack of it – emerged as the major talking point among the world’s top finance officials.

“(The) Elephant in the room at these IMF spring meetings isn’t Russia. It’s China. You won’t find anyone publicly talking about this, but behind closed doors a shift is happening due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” wrote Robin Brooks who is chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, a grouping of the world’s major financial industry players.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. President Xi Jinping, seeking to emulate Mao Zedong by becoming leader for life, declared in 2017 that China had entered a “new era” after growth had averaged 9.5pc a year since 1979 in the fastest ever sustained expansion by a major economy.

When the financial crisis nearly bankrupted Ireland and others, Beijing primed the pumps with €520bn and kept growing at 9.5pc.

President Xi saw off Donald Trump and has embarked on a ‘Made in China’ policy to dominate areas like robotics, green energy and medicine by 2025.

Yet even as Beijing sketched out a vision of the future in which it and not America was the top global player, it seemed to turn on the very tech entrepreneurs who had created Chinese firms that had leapfrogged their Western rivals.

Jack Ma’s Alibaba group was an early target and in 2020 the €35bn share offering by his Ant Group was cancelled. The head of Bytedance, the firm behind TikTok, was ousted along with many others.

In 2021, state regulators banned Didi, the country’s equivalent of Uber and its largest ride-hailing service from China’s app stores, effectively killing off its business. The move came just after it was valued at over €65bn in a Wall Street initial share offering.

“The scrutiny of large information technology companies and their rising monopolistic powers had been increasing for months, but the extent of the measures applied and the subsequent regulatory crackdown on the wider internet sector made it very clear that the US corporate growth model was no longer welcome,” said Julius Baer Group, chief investment officer Yves Bonzon whose firm overseas more than €470bn in assets

Late last year, Evergrande, one of the country’s leading property firms looked set to default on hundreds of billions of dollars of debts, dragging down other top firms. It had turned out that China was more like us than it seemed: total debts equalled 290pc of gross domestic product – about the same as in the US or eurozone – and Beijing’s answer is to ‘extend and pretend’, ie hope the problem goes away.

Investment bank JPMorgan expects there will be $32bn in bond defaults by 29 Chinese developers this year. That follows $49bn in 2021.

On top of this, Xi now seems to have misjudged the resolve of the US-led alliance in its push to force Russia into ending its war on Ukraine. China risks losing access to US financial markets, and to more American technology.

“The world’s attitude towards China and its willingness to embrace further economic integration may well be affected by China’s reaction to our call for resolute action on Russia,” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week.

“We cannot allow countries to use their market position in key raw materials, technologies, or products to have the power to disrupt our economy or exercise unwanted geopolitical leverage.”

For all its shiny new industries and genuine successes, China still lags. Shirley Yu, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week that its cutting edge chip technology is six generations behind that of Taiwan Semiconductor.

To be sure, the West has often underestimated China, but Beijing’s missteps show that hubris isn’t the sole preserve of Western capitals.