Quite suddenly, or so it seemed, China became an issue of daily international importance. It is difficult to pinpoint when, exactly, that transition took place; perhaps it was late in 2003, or maybe it was early the next year. I could not be sure. In any case, it was unlikely that there would have been any single moment when everything changed. An object as large as China cannot turn on a sixpence. Nevertheless, in my imagination at least, there may have been a tipping point. It occurred during the several weeks from mid February 2004 when, slowly at first but with mounting velocity, manhole covers started to disappear from roads and pavements all over the world. As Chinese demand drove up the price of scrap metal to record levels, thieves almost everywhere had the same idea. As darkness fell, they levered up the iron covers and sold them to local merchants who cut them up and loaded them onto ships to China. The first displacements were felt in Taiwan, the island just off China’s southeast coast. The next were in other neighbours, such as Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. But soon the gravitational pull of a resurgent ‘Middle Kingdom’ was reaching the furthest sides of the world. Wherever the sun set, pilferers worked to satisfy China’s hunger. More than 150 covers disappeared during one month in Chicago. Scotland’s `great drain robbery’ saw more than a hundred vanish in a few days. In Montreal, Gloucester and Kuala Lumpur, unsuspecting pedestrians stumbled into holes.

It was not the first time that a great power had telegraphed its arrival in an unusual way. The first inkling the British had of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of Europe, for example, was when the price of fish at Harwich, a harbour on, the North Sea, rose sharply. The explanation for this, people learned later, was that the Baltic shipping fleets, abruptly deprived of sailors required to fight the enemy approaching by horse from the east, had remained at its moorings. That had reduced the supply of cod and herring to Harwich, and prices had risen accordingly.