Never the less, China is going to struggle with many of its ambitions if as a whole it succumbs to the middle income trap.

The middle income trap is an economic development situation, where a country which attains a certain income (due to given advantages) will get stuck at that level.

Russians are stuck in 'Middle Income Trap'

A supplementary legal aid scheme started five years ago in Hong Kong was helping personal injury litigants in the middle income trap, the conference heard.

The Middle Income Trap occurs when a country's growth plateaus and eventually stagnates after reaching middle income levels.

China is enjoying double digit economic growth, but as the World Bank has pointed out, avoiding what is known as the middle income trap won't be easy as its economy continues to grow.

The risk that China might 'grow old before it grows rich' and fall into what economists call the 'middle income trap' has also raised expectations that China might relax its controversial one-child policy in a bid to ease demographic pressures.

China is also a prime candidate for the so-called "middle income trap" - the phenomenon we have seen in a number of developing countries where per capita income rises rapidly to a certain level, but then stops growing some distance short of the per capita income achieved by advanced economies.