Seth Siegel, the co-founder of Beanstalk, a brand management firm, says that branding “decommoditizes a commodity.” It coats meaning around a product. It demands a quality of experience with the consumer that has to be reinforced at every touch point, at the store entrance, in the rest rooms, on the shopping bags. The process of branding itself is essentially about the expression and manipulation of daydreams. It owes as much to romanticism as to business school.

In this way, successful branding can be radically unexpected. The most anti-establishment renegades can be the best anticipators of market trends. The people who do this tend to embrace commerce even while they have a moral problem with it — former hippies in the Bay Area, luxury artistes in Italy and France or communitarian semi-socialists in Scandinavia. These people sell things while imbuing them with more attractive spiritual associations.

The biggest threat to the creativity of American retail may be that we may have run out of countercultures to co-opt. We may have run out of anti-capitalist ethoses to give products a patina of cool. We may be raising a generation with few qualms about commerce, and this could make them less commercially creative.

But China has bigger problems. It is very hard for a culture that doesn’t celebrate dissent to thrive in this game. It’s very hard for a culture that encourages a natural deference to authority to do so. It’s very hard for a country where the powerful don’t instinctively seek a dialogue with the less powerful to keep up. It seems likely that the Chinese will require a few more cultural revolutions before it can brand effectively and compete at the top of the economic food chain.

At some point, if you are going to be the world’s leading economy, you have to establish relationships with consumers. You have to put aside the things that undermine trust, like intellectual property theft and cyberterrorism, and create the sorts of brands that inspire affection and fantasy. Until it can do this, China may statistically possess the world’s largest economy, but it will not be a particularly consequential one.