Sadly not. Imperial China enjoyed an enviable level of economic and cultural sophistication replete with invention and blessed with dynasties and an administrative class sympathetic to economic improvement, but the conditions for anything approaching an industrial revolution were lacking and the actual character of the economy and society unconducive to one. A full discussion of the context would fill a library or several, but the ultimate constraints were an official predisposition toward continuity and stability, in contrast to less restrained European elites, and an economy founded on agriculture and related production that continued to absorb increased labour supply in the absence of transformative technical change or abundant new lands sufficient to offset population growth.

The question seems to imply that it concerns the period of the oceanic voyages of Zheng He (1405-33), when China came close to vastly expanding its range of overseas connections until the dynasty abandoned the project, preferring to devote its attention to more "continental" concerns as epitomised in the 1421 transfer of the capital to inland Beijing. The issue at this stage seems one not of modern-style industrialisation - for which the markets, technology and social foundations remained lacking - but rather of expanding commercial contexts on the eve of Europe's own geographical "breakout" into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. A lost opportunity can indeed be seen there, but it was not one that would have entailed rapid industrial transformation: Europe won that race, but would still take 300-odd years to arrive at the dawn of the industrial age.

The widespread notion that China somehow "failed" to accomplish something that really wasn't on anyone's agenda at the time is one I've always found decidedly Eurocentric, seeking to impose retrospectively on one civilisation a proper destiny consistent with the later - and largely accidental - character of another. China's state and economy were already busy administering and sustaining a third of the human race - something that no competitor ever accomplished - without engaging in the kind of upheaval that transformed 19th-century Europe. Crucially, the excess of births over deaths - a measure surely of the system's success between periodic episodes of conflict or dynastic decay - required ever greater agricultural labour input per unit of finite cultivated land. China's townpeople numbered in the millions throughout the last millennium, but their proportion of total population remained at medieval European levels into the 20th century: there was work to be done in the countryside, unlike in early industrialising Europe where crop yields outstripped population growth, ultimately displacing millions into emerging industrial cities.

This is not to say that imperial China was devoid of industrial growth even in the absence of large remote markets: the Ming dynasty itself presided over significant advance in cotton manufacture, later a mainstay of the classic western industrial revolution. But cotton had to compete for land and labour with the crops that fed the people, and spinning and weaving remained a predominantly rural activity in the absence of a surplus sufficient to kickstart the rapid growth of an urban workforce available for factory production or provide the capital for such wholesale transformation. Cotton enhanced economic diversification and specialisation in favoured regions such as the Yangzi delta, but there was no agrarian margin sufficient to sustain a consumer revolution or a capitalist one.

The literature on the industrialisation topic tends to focus on the 18th century rather than the 15th, though the fundamental issue is broadly the same. I find myself more sympathetic to the "high-level equilibrium trap" of Mark Elvin (Why China failed to create an endogenous industrial capitalism, Theory and Society 13:3, May 1984) than to the "involution" theory of Philip Huang (Development or involution in eighteenth-century Britain and China, Journal of Asian Studies 61:2, May 2002), though neither really gives due credit to the advances that did occur. For the institutional, social and economic context the successive volumes of the mammoth Cambridge history of China remain invakluable, though industry receives scant attention until the later parts. For lower Yangzi cotton see also Li Bozhong, Agricultural development in Jiangnan, which concentrates on the later period but sheds light on advance under the Ming.