For many years there have been two inflation rates in Britain.

Price rises in domestic services, such as restaurant meals and sports centres, have been running at an annual rate close to 4 per cent, well above the Bank of England’s 2 per cent target. But prices of such goods as consumer electronics were falling, especially those with a ‘Made in China’ sticker on them.

With these two forces offsetting each other and pushing inflation in opposite directions, overall consumer price inflation has remained very close to the Bank of England’s 2 per cent target for overall inflation.

As cheap Chinese manufactured goods have taken the world by storm – rising from 0.8 per cent of world trade in 1978 to 7.7 per cent today – inflation in leading industrial countries has been constrained. There were plenty of tensions caused by China’s rise, but inflation, at least, was easy to manage.

That world is changing. An ever louder chorus of central bankers and international organisations are now saying that the good times might be over: Britain and other buyers of Chinese exports might no longer be able to keep importing lower inflation.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, on Monday reiterated the benefits of China’s integration into the world’s economy. “The rise in the value of what we can buy with our take-home pay has allowed businesses to recruit from a larger pool of labour without having to raise wages,” he said.

But it was clear that he was concerned that the same forces could not continue indefinitely. The governor said that higher Chinese export price inflation “is raising our import prices, over and above the increases resulting from higher energy costs”.

His concerns are reflected in the data. Import price inflation, excluding oil and erratics surged to a 10-year high in April of 3.6 per cent; the producer price inflation rose to 3 per cent in May; and goods price inflation has been positive for the past year.

Mr King is by no means alone in worrying that import prices provided only temporary relief from inflation in advanced economies. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Paris-based rich-country group, made the possibility of an end to imported disinflation from China one of the themes of its latest Economic Outlook, published last month.

Jean-Philippe Cotis, the OECD chief economist, said: “Experience over the past three years suggests that commodity price pressures may significantly outweigh the disinflationary influence of low-cost manufacturing imports”.

The new concerns about imported inflation will be mitigated by sterling’s strength over the past month. And as China’s share of world trade continues to increase, it will still contribute to lower UK inflation if its cheap goods take an ever greater share of UK imports.

But this process seems weaker than before. Few are now brave enough to believe that the world can assume import prices will continue to fall. If they start to rise at the rate of domestic services, the Bank of England will soon have an inflation problem on its hands.