The revolution that saw the birth of the People’s Republic of China 70 years ago has now come to define the parameters of most of Australia’s big economic and political choices in the world. But that would never have been so had the PRC remained the convulsed, inward-looking communist state that tried to find its way without the rest of the world — including eventually its old ideological bedfellow, the Soviet Union. In its first three decades, modern China had little impact on the world economy, closed as it was to global trade.

China's national coherence through the creation of the communist state has made possible the remarkable economic and social achievements of the past four decades. But the country’s influence and power today are significantly a product of its initially tentative but strategic choice from 1979 onwards to reform itself.