At the 1862 International Exhibition in South Kensington, the material magnificence of a long-isolated, mysterious, oriental civilisation was unveiled to the wealthy, expectant West. For two decades your dining room wasn’t a dining room without at least a grapefruit spoon in the new Japanese style.

Now, 146 years later, the International Exhibition’s offspring, the Victoria and Albert, must be aching for a repeat performance. China Design Now opens tomorrow, unveiling the material magnificence of another long-isolated, mysterious, oriental civilisation, but one which is now suddenly ubiquitous.

This exhibition focuses on three burgeoning metropolises as it seeks to showcase new Chinese architecture, fashion, furniture, graphic design and consumer products. About 100 designers are represented; there are more than 200 projects on display.

Shenzhen, the first of China’s multiplying instant cities, was also the first to open for business, its special economic zone a frontier town where graphic artists sucked on exhilarating drops of freedom issued from nearby Hong Kong. Contemporary Chinese graphic art is seen in posters, books, CD covers, skateboards, trainers and toys.

It is fascinating, touching, to see pioneers such as Wang Xu and Wang Yuefei grapple with concepts – such as individual expression – that we take for granted.

In the third hall, Beijing, you see the result. Here, visible in the architectural models, photographs and films, is the architectural face of new China, newly Botoxed with icon projects, though mostly crusted with developers’ “designer” carbuncles.

But the middle hall, Shanghai, is the most telling. In the 1920s, the Paris of the Orient sold Eastern fantasies to the West. Now it sells Western fantasies to the East. Forty years ago the Chinese hankered after “Four Great Things”: a sewing machine, a watch, a bicycle and a radio. Now it’s a Nokia, a BMW, an AppleMac and a home by Zaha.

What is dispiriting is not just that China’s entire design output seems solely defined by rabid capitalism. It is how familiar are the products of this mysterious, oriental civilisation.

Japan furiously modernised but never lost its roots; today it is the greatest design nation on Earth. Chinese design has local twists, but most of the objects featured in the V&A show might have been made in any creative city, by any youth tribe from Rio de Janeiro to Reykjavik. This is no fault of the exhibition which, as its co-curator Lauren Parker says, is merely a “snapshot”; it does its job thoroughly.

These are just early days. China, the exhibition suggests, aspires now not to make knock-offs for the West, nor to be able to afford the real thing. It wants its own brands. And only when a strikingly original voice emerges in design – a Rem Koolhaas, a Sony, a Jonathan Ive – or perhaps when we find ourselves buying not iPods but ChiPods, only then will China have arrived.

Box office: 0870 9063883. March 14 until July 13

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