It's China's mass market that offers the best opportunities Splitting China's 600m strong urban population into income bands, its conclusion is that the mass market (with earnings of between £150 and £400 a month) provides the best long-term growth prospects and more reliable, structural rather than cyclical, growth too. As the mass market accounts for around three quarters of city-dwellers, boosted by millions of migrant workers in recent years, the growth potential for products such as a humble British breakfast cereal is immense. As the information overload of a week in China settles, one of my main conclusions is that sometimes we over-complicate investment. Having visited around 20 companies and spoken to many other experts on the Chinese economy, I understand the concerns about China - inflation, bad debts, over-investment - but the sheer scale of the transformation of a country of 1.3bn people from an export and investment-led economy to a domestic consumption-driven one trumps these. As one of many articulate and impressive business leaders I had the opportunity to talk with put it, "everyone says China is difficult to read, but it's actually the simplest country in the world to understand. You just have to look at the Five Year plan. The latest of these makes quite clear that the Government is guiding the economy to a slower and more sustainable rate of growth (although at around 8pc a year, one we'd certainly settle for), a much reduced dependence on infrastructure investment and a massive increase in the spending power of the ordinary worker. The minimum wage will increase by 15pc a year for the next five years, which will double the incomes of low-earners and bring a bowl of Weetabix within the reach of millions. Mass market consumption will benefit from two other factors: the ongoing urbanization of China, which has some considerable way to go, and improvements in the social safety net, the absence of which has been a driver of China's extremely high savings rate. In the five years to 2010, government spending on healthcare, for example, rose more than three-fold. As one China strategist told me, the fact that household consumption is still a small part of China's GDP merely reflects the 25pc annual growth in investment over the past nine years. China "will continue to be the world's best consumption story for everything from instant noodles to luxury cars." This does not mean that profiting from China's rapid growth will be easy. The one thing that is abundantly clear from a visit to China is that it is different - different priorities, different standards of corporate governance, a wholly different relationship between the individual and the state. That means there is no substitute for kicking the tyres on the ground and doing plenty of due diligence. I would be surprised if long-term outperformance did not make it worth the effort. Tom Stevenson is an investment director at Fidelity Worldwide Investment. The views expressed are his own. He tweets at @tomstevenson63