Little is known about the most powerful man in the world’s most populous country, but it is clear that Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, likes pomp and circumstance, and so he will be given the full treatment tonight at Buckingham Palace. Whether this fondness for being celebrated is a fascinating personal weakness or a symptom of noxious nationalism should be somewhat clearer by the end of his visit. Mr Hu is a man of mystery, so any insight into his character will be an advance on profound ignorance. China-watchers initially thought him a closet reformer but now there are fears that he may just be a Communist, the first heading the Chinese party for two decades.

It is important that Mr Hu sees the world, for the world is making up its mind about China. Is it the ultimate mercantilist machine, churning out more bras than there are breasts, or does it remain a vulnerable developing country and the standard-bearer of the Third World? Is it, like Japan, an economic force but a political eunuch? Is its policy of “peaceful co-existence” merely a cover for an idiosyncratic isolationism that will undermine its strategic long-term interests? Will it make the same mistakes as earlier US generations in its quest for energy security, propping up despotic regimes for the sake of Shanghai’s petrol pumps?

The last Chinese emperor was Deng Xiaoping and even his power was based on the approval of a cadre of old revolutionaries. Mr Hu is less secure and therefore unable to be the sole purveyor of policy or, in some cases, even to enunciate the collective policy. And yet it falls to him to define China for the outside world and for Chinese themselves. The spiritual barrenness of communism has been replaced in most Chinese lives by an understandable quest for economic improvement, but it has come without much sensible debate about social morality or demo-cracy or about the separate barren state that is crass, compulsive consumerism.

Coy China, all too fond of the advantages of ambiguity, must be prepared to state the obvious — that it does share values with the so-called West. These are not necessarily Western values, as much as standards of behaviour and tolerance absent from the thinking of, for example, Islamist extremists who will increasingly come to regard China as a legitimate foe. Beijing’s rule over Xinjiang in the far west inspires outrage among radicals who regard the presence of Han infidels as an abomination and will inevitably perceive an immensely powerful China as a target second only to that of the US.

The developing world is already having second thoughts about Beijing’s influence. When US textile quotas were lifted, it was not shirt factories in Wisconsin that suffered (most were closed long ago), but emerging industries in Latin America, Bangladesh and Vietnam. And if your small country was interested in a modest expansion of light industry, how would you compete with the toy, clothing and electrical juggernaut that is China?

Mr Hu’s contribution to Chinese political thought, historically a struggle for the ideologically innumerate with such conceptual clusters as the “Three Represents” and the “Four Modernisations”, is the “Harmonious Society”. It emphasises the need for balanced domestic development. That desired harmony will only be achieved when China is more open to internal criticism and external debate. We know the Hu of “Who is running China? ”, but not yet the whys and wherefores.