Early in 2004, in cities across the world, something strange was happening.

Starting slowly at first, then at ever increasing speed, manhole covers were disappearing in the middle of the night, causing unsuspecting pedestrians to fall into holes.

With scrap metal prices being driven up to record levels by Chinese demand, thieves saw the chance to cash in.

The iron covers were sold to local merchants, cut up, then shipped to China.

The period, dubbed "The Great Drain Robbery" in Scotland, is recorded in British journalist James Kynge's new book, "China Shakes the World The Rise of a Hungry Nation."

During the country's astonishing economic growth, which he charts in the book, Kynge, 42, has had a front-row seat.

Having lived in or around China since 1985 and being the China bureau chief for the Financial Times since 1998, Kynge uses that tenure to seize the opportunity to analyze not only the extraordinary rise of the Chinese economy, but also to suggest what the future may hold, as China begins to influence the world more and more.

"The disappearance of the manhole covers was a sign that something big was happening," Kynge said in an interview.

"It was a sign of a really pivotal change.

"Before that, for myself and the other journalists at the Financial Times in China, it was about how things were changing in China.

"Then, suddenly, in around 2003 or 2004, I began to get calls from Financial Times guys in Latin America, asking what was happening here, saying that China was changing their economy.

"I then started to get calls from Financial Times offices in all different parts of the world, asking the same thing.

"I remember a Japanese economist saying in 2004: 'The Japanese business cycle is made in China like everything else we buy.'"

Up until this decade, Kynge said, China was a large but far-off presence for many. But now it seemingly has a bearing on everything, from countries' jobs to their economies, he added.

Kynge told China Daily, and outlines in the book, that China's economic growth and manufacturing prowess can largely be attributed to a "compression of developmental time."

"You have got guys working for less than they would have done during Britain's Industrial Revolution, but this is married together with 21st century infrastructure and 21st century globalization," he said.

In a vivid example in the book of China's industrial emergence and the faltering of the West, Kynge tells how a steel plant was virtually shipped halfway across the world to China.

The site, in Dortmund, Germany, had once employed about 10,000 people but closed in 2002.

Kynge visited where the plant had stood to research his book. He described seeing a scar of ochre earth, 25 times the size of a football pitch.

A month after the factory closed, a Chinese company bought it. It was dismantled, packed onto ships and then reassembled near the mouth of the Yangtze River.

But, as Kynge reveals, it was not that fact alone that surprised local people. Seemingly out of nowhere, nearly 1,000 Chinese arrived, who went on to work 12-hour days, seven days a week, to take down the structure.

The speed of their work became a local media sensation: Chinese deconstruction teams without the use of safety harnesses could be seen 60 metres above the ground, on exposed walkways and clinging from scaffolding poles.

The dismantling was completed in less than one year two years faster than the German company that owned the mill had initially estimated.

Speed was of the essence for the Chinese firm to meet the world's demand for its goods.

China's industrial growth is not the only thing that has caught Kynge's attention; social changes have been equally profound.

"People here who are in their late 20s are very different in their outlook from people from other countries who are in their late 20s.

"While it's difficult to make generalizations about young people, they seem to be becoming a lot more outward looking."

The biggest question now, he said, was how the West viewed and dealt with China's growth. "It is a challenge unprecedented in the annals of global capitalism," Kynge said in the book.

He told China Daily: "China presents a huge, competitive challenge to every manufacturing industry in the West, no matter if it is at the bottom end of the value chain, such as shoes and textiles, to the top of the value chain, such as semi-conductors.

"But the response from the West should not be one of despair. China is as weak as it is strong. It has extreme strengths in areas of manufacturing and extreme weaknesses in areas such as the environment and the service industries.

"If a rise in protectionism against China is going to be avoided, then there needs to be a balance of benefit between the West and China.

"One way to get the balance is allowing China to play to its strengths in manufacturing, and, on the other hand, the Chinese Government's allowing Western countries to play to their strengths in China, which primarily means opening up their service sector, financial services, publishing and education."

More than 200 years earlier, he explains in the book, Lord George Macartney, envoy of the British King George III, was sent to persuade Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to open the vast Chinese market to trade. The emperor, unimpressed with Macartney's demands, sent him home, with a note to inform the king that China had "not the slightest need for your country's manufactures."

Qianlong and later emperors continued to resist British and European calls for trade, but by 2005, when it came to manufactured goods at least, things had shifted dramatically, Kynge said. For the first time since Macartney's ill-fated mission, China had become more open to the world than the world was to China.

Source: China Daily