Walk around the streets of Barcelona this week and you could be forgiven for thinking that Chinese is the fourth official language of the Mobile World Congress, behind Catalan, English and Spanish. The growing Chinese presence at the wireless industry's annual confab, shows just how important China's manufacturers -- and its mammoth consumer market -- have become to the industry's future.

Back when the show was called 3GSM and held in Cannes, Chinese visitors were as rare as hen's teeth. They were viewed with curiosity and occasional suspicion by western players who feared the Chinese were only interested in reverse engineering their latest products.

But today Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE are treated as equals in the innovation stakes and their stands at events like MWC rival those of Nokia or Motorola in size and crowd-pulling potential.

ZTE, for example, unveiled what it claims is the world's smallest TV data card for mobile phones and boasted of its plug-and-play capabilities. Anything which makes it easier to watch mobile TV on notebook computers is presumably going to go down well with the operators.

ZTE is already the world's second biggest manufacturer of HSPA data cards for laptops, and just around the corner is HSPA+. The company argues that the emergence of high-bandwidth services such as mobile TV, downloading of music TV and film clips, and large volume mail services is placing significant strain on network speed and capacity. HSPA+ aims to meet the challenge and ZTE showed a new HSPA+ card, capable of downloading content at up to 21 megabits a second -- compared to the 14.4Mbps of HSPA.

Wang Jianzhou, CEO of China Mobile, spoke at a press conference about the mouth-watering potential for China's massive wireless market.

The release of new spectrum for mobile broadband services in 2009 could add around $211bn to China's GDP, according to a report commissioned by the GSMA, the trade body behind MWC.

The roll-out of mobile broadband networks will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, encourage new businesses across the value chain, improve productivity and boost consumer spending, gushes the report. Although presumably not too many of those jobs are earmarked for China's 20m migrant workers who were abruptly sacked as the global downturn hit China's traditional economy.

Perhaps the best example of China's newfound importance in this industry was seemingly trivial agreement of leading phone manufacturers and operators to standardise on a single phone charger. Look on the bottom of your mobile phone charger and it probably says "Made in China". The agreement to standardise chargers was presented as a big benefit for consumers -- no more having to remember to take the correct charger on your next trip.

But the deal will also rapidly tighten Chinese electronic manufacturers' grip on this particular market as it plays to their strengths in economies of scale and ruthlessly driving down costs.

With the day nearing when every phone charger is Made in China, what are the odds that every phone will one day be Made in China as well?