Yonden Lhatoo, the chief news editor at the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, wrote in a scathing column: "Anyone with a basic education should know by now that the ridiculous tradition of men having to buy diamond engagement rings for women before marriage was wholly concocted."

Diamonds are such a waste of money, he wrote: "If you must buy a diamond, it makes much more sense to go for a lab-manufactured one."

HUGE POTENTIAL AHEAD

The man-made diamond jewelry market will grow 22 percent annually from 1.9 billion U.S. dollars to 5.2 billion by 2023, Zimnisky said.

Liu, of Sino-Crystal, said that man-made diamonds might not cannibalize sales of mined diamonds, but that market alone boded well for Chinese manufacturers.

"Could they compete with De Beers? Yes, they certainly could. It just concerns technology that almost anyone can obtain these days, so why could a Chinese manufacturer not make the same product as well as anyone else?" Donckier said.

"The quality of Chinese synthetic diamond production appears to be advancing quite rapidly from what I am seeing. I have seen some Chinese product that rivals that of Lightbox," Zimnisky said.

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