Has China obtained the world’s most important machine?

The Dutch punch above their weight in technology transfers that shaped the modern world. In the 17th century their financial and farming innovations spread to Britain, spurring the Industrial Revolution and the British empire’s expansion. Peter the Great, a Russian tsar, studied Dutch shipbuilding techniques to build the navy that made Russia a maritime power in the 18th century. And in the 1970s a Pakistani scientist, A.Q. Khan, stole blueprints from a Dutch lab to launch his country’s nuclear-weapons programme and seed similar efforts in North Korea, Iran and Libya.