He makes a strong case: sustaining economic growth and competitiveness requires China to get beyond mere labour-driven manufacturing and into the knowledge-based business of discoveries, inventions and other advances.Yet doing so will be hard, not least because of the country's well-earned reputation for pervasive academic and scientific misconduct.
In Lincoln on Saturday a mere 10 Labour party members turned up.
Had Ukip attracted a mere 309 extra Labour deserters, it would have had a shock second win, and Mr Miliband's future would have been in question.
It was not supposed to offer a choice between competing visions of society and its future, just May's stern competence and the mere anarchy of Labour.
Toronto FC, in existence for mere months and labouring through its first season at the bottom of the Eastern Conference of the MLS (tied, mind you, with Chicago Fire and with more points than the LA Galaxy), is an instant hit.
Result in 2010: The Conservatives managed a majority of a mere 333 votes over Labour.
In Chile, it employs only 74,000 people; in Peru, miners form a mere 1% of the labour force.
But the mere fact of a Labour victory in Corby, if that is what we get, will tell us nothing more than the expected shoo-ins in Manchester and Cardiff.
A Qatari failure to enshrine those standards in national legislation, its implementation so far of only minor changes like obliging to employers to pay wages and salaries by bank transfer, and its mere incremental increase of labour inspectors tasked with enforcing existing rules and regulations has undermined credibility Qatar established by engaging with its critics.
The distortion means that the Tories need a six-point lead in the popular vote to win mere equality of seats with Labour; that, and the fact that Labour doesn't face a challenge on its flanks of the kind that Cameron does from Ukip.
