In what the Financial Times describes as a great leap, next year (and four years earlier than expected) China is set to become the world's largest producer of manufactured goods with 17% of manufacturing value-added output, while the rapidly weakening US economy will have to settle for second place with 16%. Underlining the surge of China's manufacturing-led economy (China contributed only 3% of global manufacturing in 1990), The Financial Times is in no doubt about the historical significance of the development:

The expected change will end more than a 100 years of US dominance. It returns China to a position it occupied, according to economic historians, for some 1,800 years up to about 1840, when Britain became the world's biggest manufacturer after its Industrial Revolution.

One defining element that typified the divergence between China and the West during the latter's rise to ascendancy during the Industrial Revolution was the utterly novel ability to build a machine, and a steam engine in particular - the quintessential invention of the Industrial Revolution. Here I can only acknowledge my sage old history professor at the London School of Economics, Prof Kent Deng who, with his paper Why the Chinese Failed to Develop A Steam Engine, delved into the multiple reasons why pre-modern China was never able to progress from building production processes relying on human or natural forces to inventing a man-made engine utilizing the conversion of one form of energy to another, as is the case with the steam engine.

Yet in an inverted parallel between ancient China and the modern, confident Middle Kingdom, contemporary China's ability to build and export various machines is indeed setting it apart from the rest of the world. Apart from its imminent status as the world's leading manufacturer, China is now the world's leading exporter of machinery and electrical equipment (i), and it exports more high technology than Germany and Japan (ii). Most (56%) of its high tech exports, moreover, go to the US, Japan and Germany (ii), and its high tech exports to the US has grown by 197% from 1990 to 2004 (ii).

If 2009 is then to be the year when China officially returns to a position of dominance in the world, it remains a fascinating sight to behold China's ongoing great leap into the unknown - by no means a perfect journey, but history moving before our eyes.