When inflation starts to kill people then it is a serious problem. Three people died and 31 were injured on Saturday in a stampede to buy cut-price cooking oil in the western Chinese city of Chongqing. China can no longer explain away inflation as a short-term result of floods and epidemics of animal disease – nor can it ignore the strains its macroeconomic policies are producing.

Cooking oil is a special case – its price influenced by demand from China’s glut of new biofuel refineries – but the broader price of food has risen in recent months by more than 15 per cent compared with a year earlier. Floods and other acts of God have had their effect, as has the global rise in wheat prices, but there are structural forces at work as well.