When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visits China later this year he will encounter a nation whose future is about as uncertain as it was 50 years ago when Gough Whitlam became the first Australian prime minister to visit in late 1973.
Then China was poor, in the process of reengaging the rest of the world after decades of isolation under Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. Today it is, on one measure, the second-biggest economy in the world, one of the top five along with the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.
