People of my generation have been fascinated by modern Chinese history since our days in school. In our teenage, it was the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao Zedong (at the time his name was spelt as Mao Tse-tung) many of us read, with some of us not quite grasping the entirety of the message the Great Helmsman meant to convey. But, no matter. It was good enough for us that China was a vociferous backer of the Vietnamese in their struggle to unify their divided country in the face of American firepower in South Vietnam. When we read of condemnations of “US imperialism” by the leadership in Beijing, we were thrilled to bits.

China, we told ourselves, was on its way to being a force for good in the world. We marvelled at the long journey which Prime Minister Zhou Enlai undertook in Africa in the early 1960s. It was an early sign of the diplomacy China would in later times exercise across the globe. When the French government of President Charles de Gaulle in 1964 accorded diplomatic recognition to the government of China, a government that had come into existence through the revolution of October 1949, the sure knowledge dawned among us that the sleeping giant which China had so long been was beginning to stir itself awake.

It is immaterial as to whether Napoleon described China as a sleeping giant that, once it woke up, would shake the world. The far more important truth is that China is today shaking up the globe in a way never seen or felt or imagined before. Chinese footsteps are visible almost everywhere. Think of Africa, of Latin America. Think of the tech giants in the West which rely on Chinese as well as Indian tech-savvy people to operate their businesses. When President Xi Jinping presided over a recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), he gave out the clear message that along with India and Russia his country was shaping a clear strategy of reshaping the world in the interest largely of history.

We of our generation have not forgotten that moment when history was laid low through John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration, turning disdainfully away as Premier Zhou Enlai moved toward him with outstretched hand. The occasion was the pivotal Geneva Conference of 1954. Dulles and the likes of him were yet bothered over the issue of losing China to the Communist Party. For them, it was not China but Red China. There was, in much of the West at the time, a determined refusal to acknowledge the Chinese Revolution, indeed to imagine that in time Mao and his comrades would collapse and the country would revert to being a plaything in the hands of its erstwhile overseas exploiters.

When you sit back today, all these decades after Dulles walked away as Zhou approached him, and think back on how history was reversed only eighteen years after that moment when the American embarrassed himself, you cannot but realise how China grew in influence in that space of time. Images of Richard Nixon stepping out of his presidential aircraft in Beijing in February 1972, hand outstretched toward a waiting Zhou Enlai speak of history in its new formulation, Here was an American President making amends for the rude behaviour of a Secretary of State all those years ago. Was it poetic justice? Or was it a refashioning of history? Let the answer take any form. The reality was out there. China had arrived.

We of our generation have read of the Great Leap Forward. We scoured the newspapers for reports of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. When images of Chairman Mao were flashed in the media of his swimming prowess at an age when other men were content to rest at home and watch the sunset, we were impressed. And when Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, met a sorry end in September 1971, we guessed that something had gone terribly wrong in Chinese politics. But if 1971 was the year when politics in China was in a state of convulsion, it was also a time when China reclaimed its place in the global community. Formosa, also known as Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek had fled with his Kuomintang following the Communist victory on the mainland in 1949, was shown the door at the United Nations. The People’s Republic of China breezed in to claim the seat that it ought to have been given following the revolution.

As our generation grew older, China kept on changing. In the year in which France acknowledged the Chinese government as the legitimate representative of the Chinese people, the atomic bomb detonated by Beijing turned it into a power to reckon with. It joined the nuclear club as its fifth member. Marxists and socialists around the world cheered. The country’s march was now unstoppable, despite the many disruptions it continually came across. Post-Mao, the fall of the Gang of Four and the rise of Deng Xiao-ping signalled the advent of a new China, one that, having consolidated itself internally, was ready to play a role it believed it had been invested with by history. In other words, China was reaching out to the world through a reordering of its political and economic priorities.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chinese leadership was well aware of the fact that it needed to avoid the blunders that had felled Mikhail Gorbachev and dismantled the Soviet Union. A liberalisation of the economy without tinkering with the established political system was a guarantee that China would handle the demands of history on its own terms. That has meant a resurgence of China across the landscape of geopolitics. In a world that has been left poorer and vulnerable through the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and in eastern Europe, China has been striding forth to fill the void.

That, briefly, is a tribute to the resilience of the Chinese political system. Call the country the Middle Kingdom or the awakened giant, it is a place where not just politics but millennia of literary and cultural tradition have underscored its foundational principles. China is a global power today, a force its detractors know is endlessly on the rise.

On 1 October 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed the rise of the People’s Republic in Beijing, the message was loud enough to be heard around the world: China had vanquished the forces arrayed against it and indeed had arrived.

On 1 October 2025, on the watch of Xi Jinping, China is busy reshaping and reinventing the contours of global power politics. With other rising powers in the world, China knows it is well placed to push back the hegemony which some nations yet believe they can uphold in these fast changing times.

Revolutions remake societies. In October 1949, the Chinese leadership, with the legacy of the Long March behind it, with memories of foreign aggression perpetrated against the people of China, brought about a revolution that was to transform not just China but politics at the international level. China today is an embodiment of history fashioned on the heights of grandeur. Mao’s dictum, “beauty lies at the top of the mountain”, is the idea which resonates in Beijing in these transformative times.