Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.
By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.