"China has stood up!" With those words, Mao Zedong, speaking from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace to ajubilant throng gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square,conjured a nation into being on 1 October 1949. Mao,obsessed with self-reliance and selfless egalitarianism,could hardly have envisioned what China would looklike now.

Today, the country's heft is felt worldwide in nearly every sector and along the entire chain of economic activity. China's ferocious appetite for the energy and raw materials needed to fuel its prodigious growth is the driving force of commodity markets on every continent. For several years running, China has been the world's biggest consumer of coal, grain, meat, iron ore, steel, and concrete. Once a net exporter of oil, last year it imported half of what it consumed and 40 percent more than in the previous year. If the global markets for coffee and cocoa remain depressed, it's probably because the Chinese don't have much of a taste for either.

At the other end of the manufacturing spectrum, China has emerged as a major producer—often the major producer—of consumer goods, ranging from clothes and toys to televisions and personal computers. Its ability to manufacture quickly and cheaply has,in a brief span, conquered or disrupted national markets all over theglobe. Case in point: China's share of the U.S. textile market stoodat 70 percent at the end of 2004, and textile imports from China jumpedby 40 percent after the remaining U.S. tariffs were removed in January.The competition, in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere,is left with a stark choice: match the China price or perish.

Still, China buys almost as much as it sells. True, a large percentage of those imports are materials and components that it uses to assemble goods it then exports. But China's foreign spending spree in 2004 topped US $500 billion.

The allure of the Chinese market—a chimera until very recently—has attracted nearly every multinational on the planet. From fast food (KFC, McDonald's) and pharmaceuticals (Pfizer, Merck) to retailers (Carrefour, Wal-Mart) and automobiles (General Motors, Volkswagen), China is simply the world's hottest market, thanks to the newly awakened Chinese consumer. Little wonder, then, that foreign direct investment hit a record $66.5 billion last year, second only to the United States' $121 billion. Even venture capitalists are flocking to China looking for the next 51job.com, the leading Chinese employment Web site, which returned $260 million in four years on Menlo, Calif.-based Doll Capital Management's $14 million investment.

Cash-rich Chinese companies are also moving funds in the other direction. When a relatively unknown Chinese TV maker called TCL, based in Guangdong province's Huizhou, bought the TV division of France's Thomson SA, in Boulogne, last year, it instantly became the largest TV maker in the world [see Digital TV's 100-Meter Dash in this issue]. And when Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd., in Beijing, picked up IBM Corp.'s PC division for an estimated $1.75 billion, the symbolism was thick enough to cut with a cleaver: China had taken possession of the brand that was once synonymous with computers. "Will your next boss be Chinese?" the normally reserved conservative daily Le Figaro asked its French readers with a mixture of alarm and awe.

Fifteen years ago, CEOs and analysts carefully weighed the risks of doing business in China. Today, attracted by the siren call of opportunity and driven by the fear of being left behind, they are far more likely to be weighing the risks of not doing business there. "Any company that is not involved in China or doesn't have well-developed plans in that direction is totally asleep," Donald Straszheim, an institutional investment consultant in Los Angeles and former chief economist for Merrill Lynch and Co., recently told Spectrum

. "If you own shares in that company, sell them."