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How Money Works: Will China own us all?

It's no secret China has been booming while the West declines. In fact, it's been growing so fast it's started expanding overseas, too: buying up businesses in the UK, U.S. and elsewhere. So, how worried should we be?

Napoleon once said, apparently, ‘let China sleep because when she wakes she’ll shake the world’.

Indeed, for much of the industrial revolution, China was taking a nap – so to speak.

But in 1978 things began to change. The Communist country encouraged private enterprise and unleashed its biggest asset: 975million citizens.

There then ensued mass migrations to urban areas where people took up jobs in factories to manufacture goods for export.

Since then the economy dubbed ‘the dragon’ has doubled its slice of the global economy and it’s predicted that by 2016 China will be the world’s biggest economy.

Can anything stand in the way of the Asian powerhouse?

Watch more episodes from Yahoo! Finance's How Money Works series