There's an annotation in a Chinese industry research report that, if acted on, would tear the heart out of the Australian economy.
There are two crosses next to the words "iron ore" and "coking coal". It may not look dire but as portents go, it's pretty dark.
Meanwhile in Beijing, an extraordinary global infrastructure plan is taking shape. It features new roads, railway lines and even fast trains stretching, octopus-like, from China, and criss-crossing Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa, from Warsaw to Cape Town. They call it "One Belt, One Road". 
If only a small part of this plan takes shape it, too, will have a radical impact on Australia, and of course the world.
The research report refers to a future, low-pollution Chinese steel-making process, based on high-temperature combustion technology, or HTAC. This involves baking the raw ingredients to high temperatures to produce, say, steel, but without the collateral pollution that results from traditional steel-making techniques.
This means the dramatic reduction of polluting agents, like C02, during the steel-making process also - at least notionally - obviates the need for high-quality coking coal and high-grade iron ore.
It is just one example of a revolutionary, low-pollution, manufacturing-of-the-future technology that the Chinese are expending enormous energy and resources on developing. This new technology could dispense with the high-quality iron ore and coal that now dominate Australian exports to China, and underpin Australia's wealth.
The new steel-making technique could replace Australian iron ore and coal with low-quality Chinese products. A pilot $US100 million plant run by the Shenwu group already exists in an impressive facility on the outskirts of Beijing.
But there are no current mass production plans; in fact, it is such early days that development timetables do not even exist.
There is a similar vagueness about the bold One Belt, One Road plan that promises to revolutionise so much of the world's transport infrastructure.
But, hey, this is China, the nation that turned the world upside down inside a generation. There were many nay-sayers around at the time, including in Australia, as the Middle Kingdom galloped from economic irrelevance to become the world's number two economy.
This generational transformation represents the most astonishing economic change in history, one that eclipses America's rise, or the dramatic postwar recovery of Japanese industry.
It would therefore behove Australian iron ore miners such as BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue, as well as foreign policy and defence planners, to run their proverbial slide rules over these plans and ponder what they mean.
Indeed, they throw up probing questions. On the 50th anniversary since an Australian iron ore carrier delivered its bounty to Japan from the Hamersley mine does Australia's giant iron ore province in the Pilbara region of Western Australia face a finite shelf life?
More generally, has America's plan for a China-excluding Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, including Australia, pushed China into launching a massive trade and infrastructure plan covering all of Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa?
Australia's rise in the '80s, '90s and early 2000s to become the world's 12th biggest economy rested in large part on our miners, tourist resorts, universities, specialist medical clinics, and even lawyers, architects and accountants, taking advantage of China's astonishing growth.
Now a communist government running a country with 1.3 billion people faces a host of new challenges. It must deal with high pollution levels in cities such as Beijing, Chonqing, Shanghai, Shenzen and Harbin, while delivering on its promise to bring 800 million of its citizens into the middle class.
At first blush, the new steel-making process and One Belt, One Road project may appear to have nothing in common. But both spring from the same impulse: to safeguard China's place in the world.
China's economic and foreign policies are dominated by the long-term issue of how it can survive and prosper in a world that some time this century, possibly even in the next 35 years, will grow to 9 billion people.
The world's most populous nation will need to guarantee supplies of food and energy but also ensure that its citizens living in huge urban conurbations of up to 100 million people breathe fresh air, drink clean water and eat healthy food.
This is where the futuristic plans of the Shenwu plant come into focus. According to Liu Feng, deputy director of Shenwu's international business department, its new furnace technology will reduce carbon emissions by 90 per cent.
Meanwhile, at the prestigious China Institute of International Studies, which comes under the direction of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they are putting the flesh around the One Belt, One Road rhetoric that has emerged in the past year.
It centres on Chinese-sponsored infrastructure plans that would at first concentrate on south Asia, central Asia and eastern Europe, and eventually stretch into all of the world's land mass not covered by North and South America, and Oceania.
The sheer scope of the plan is underlined in the remarks of Li Qing Yan from the China Institute of International Affairs, that it "is a kind of road map to integrate China and the world economy".
So how will Australia "integrate" with such a China-flavoured world? P
Andrew Clark is travelling in China as a guest of the Australia-China Relations Institute.