Airdate: From Mao to Now: Peking Assignment

Next week ABC News 24 screens From Mao to Now: Peking Assignment, a look at the past 40 years of China’s history and how ABC correspondents reported it, using treasures from the ABC archive.

In the early 1970’s China was poor, backward and just emerging from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution lead by Chairman Mao. In 2013, China is a country transformed. Tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty, hundreds of millions have moved from farms to cities and Beijing considers itself a world power, snapping at the heels of Washington.

The ABC opened its Peking Bureau weeks before Prime Minister Gough Whitlam paid a visit to China.

“Here was a massive world story in terms of what was going to happen; waving Little Red Books or Deng Xiaoping, ‘To Get Rich is Glorious’ and China becomes massively rich,” says the ABC’s first Peking correspondent Paul Raffaele.

“I had a sense of stepping back in time to another planet,” said the ABC’s second Peking correspondent Warren Duncan. It was “a world very different from ours, but was now in a unique experiment of dragging people forward from a feudal age but not making them capitalist, making them communist.”

What was it really like for the journalists who first got a glimpse behind the Bamboo Curtain, only to witness the cracking of the Iron Rice Bowl, the crisis of Tiananmen Square, the staging of the Olympics in 2008 and now the rise of nation that is viewed with both suspicion and admiration? Will the China story end peacefully and will its economic experiment succeed?

ABC News 24 broadcaster and former ABC China correspondent Jane Hutcheon, explores the past 40 dramatic years of China’s history, and how ABC correspondents reported it, using treasures from the ABC archive.

Wednesday 18 December at 9.30 pm (AEDT) on ABC News 24