Episode 2: The View from Beijing

Tristan Redman is joined by Carrie Gracie, former BBC China editor and a reporter in China throughout the 1990s, and George Magnus, an economist and research associate at the China Centre, Oxford University, and former chief economist at UBS.

Together they examine the decade in which China reshaped its relationship with the international system. They begin with Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour of 1992, when the then-retired Communist Party leader travelled to China's special economic zones to press the case for economic reform, a trip widely seen as decisive in setting China's course for the following decades.

They discuss the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, under the "one country, two systems" framework, and the Asian financial crisis of the same year, which left China's capital controls looking vindicated while much of the region required IMF assistance.

The episode also covers the 1999 Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and concludes with China's accession to the World Trade Organisation in December 2001, an agreement built on Western assumptions that economic integration would bring political liberalisation, and one whose consequences are still being worked through today.

A BBC News Long Form Audio production

Presenter: Tristan Redman
Producers: Keiligh Baker and Nik Sindle
Sound engineers: Neil Churchill, Gareth Jones and Michael Regaard
Production co-ordinators: Sophie Hill and Katie Morrison
Editor: Matt Willis
Radio 4 commissioners: Daniel Clarke and Hugh Levinson