Will the 21st century belong to China? For a while, perhaps — but only in the sense that it was said to belong to Japan in the 1980s. Looking back now, that seems ridiculous, but at the time best-selling books were predicting that Americans, not to mention the rest of the planet, would be reduced to virtual serfdom by the relentless high-speed growth of the Japanese economy. Then it stopped growing.

Official data published on Aug. 16 revealed that China's economy has overtaken Japan's this year, making it the second-biggest economy in the world. This followed last month's announcement by the International Energy Agency that China is now the world's biggest consumer of energy (and burns about half of the world's total coal production).

Earlier this year China overtook Germany to become the world's No. 1 exporter, and it now makes more cars than any other country in the world. Indeed, it makes as many as Japan and the United States together.