Of course, history is never so clear- cut. Struggle and counter-struggle had been raging within the Communist party since Mao had died two years earlier. Deng, forced to work at a tractor factory during the Cultural Revolution because of his “rightist” tendencies, had long believed rigid communist ideology and overweening state interference were leading the economy down a dead end.

Yet today is as good a time as any to take stock. Deng's China, to this day a pragmatic blend of capitalism and communist state control, has lasted 30 years. That is one year more than Mao's China, born in 1949 with the victory of the Red Army and subsequently dragged through the madness of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. What have those 30 years brought to China and to the world?

A degree of economic prosperity, undoubtedly. By 1978, China had begun to recover from the brutal distractions of the later Mao years. By dint of its sheer scale, it was already the world's 10th largest economy. But annual income per capita was still pitifully low at $190, making it, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, 175th in the global pecking order. Three decades of compounding nearly 10 per cent annual growth has brought income per head to about $2,500, and much higher than that on the prosperous eastern seaboard. Although that still ranks only 132nd – other countries have not stood still either – China has become the world's fourth biggest economy, second on a purchasing power parity basis.