Made in China

The inventors of ancient China may have given the world gunpowder, but by the 1940s, their descendents would come to know a box of matches as yang huo, or foreign-made fire.

In fact, foreign-made goods were inescapable in the daily life of ordinary Chinese just half a century ago. A bicycle was a yang che (foreign-made car), a shovel was yang qiao and kerosene was known as yang you. Even the horses, a foreign breed taller and stouter than native breeds, were called yang ma.

The names underlined a bleak reality - that the country's manufacturing capacity was so poor that it could not produce even necessities, let alone more advanced industrial products.

Then came the economic reforms in the late '70s. Today, the 'made in China' label is stamped on products available the world over, from clothes to ships, lighters to TV sets, mobile phones and raw materials like steel.

The output and sales of its car industry - which began from scratch in the 1950s- rose to No1 in the world in January this year, overtaking the United States, the long-time leader of the world automobile industry.

China's steel output dwarfs that of any other country. Last year, it topped the chart for the 13th consecutive year with 500 million tonnes of steel - 37.67 per cent of the world's total, and more than the combined output of the eight countries that ranked behind it. In 1949, China ranked 26th with an output of just 158,000 tonnes, less than 0.1 per cent of the world's total.