The west’s response to the rise of China as an economic force in the 1990s and 2000s was patronising and complacent.

The assumption was that China might grab a good chunk of the world’s low-cost manufacturing while the clever stuff would be done in Europe, Japan and North America. We would get our cheap toys and mass-produced TVs from Guangdong, but advanced manufacturing, anything that required a bit of brain power, would stay at home.

Well, take a look at this chart from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

China poised to outpace US in R&D spending Photograph: OECD Science, Technology and Industry Outlook 2014 - © OECD 2014

It shows that China is not content with the role allocated to it by western policymakers. China already spends a lot more on R&D than Japan, was about to overtake the EU when the latest figures were compiled in 2012 and will, on current trends, surpass the United States by 2019.

These trends are already marked. From 2008-12, the crisis years and their immediate aftermath, R&D spending in the OECD, a group of 34 rich nations, rose by 1.6% a year, half the rate seen between 2001-2008. In China it doubled.

Is this a surprise? Not really. There was never any real reason to expect that China would be content with the role allocated to it by the west. This is a country, after all, that made key breakthroughs with the compass, gunpowder, printing and paper making. In the Middle Ages, China’s level of technological advance was centuries ahead of Europe’s.

The fact that it is now enjoying a “brain gain” of scientists from the rest of the world should be seen as evidence that it wants to reassert its old dominance.