By Robert Lawrence Kuhn

In this 40th year of China's reform and opening up, President Xi Jinping calls for comprehensively deepening reform and further opening up. That's why we title this series, "40 Years and Counting: Transforming Reform and Opening up for the New Era.” 

What lessons have been learned? What challenges lie ahead? In this first episode, we explore the big vision and broad guidance of China's reform and opening up policies. 

Forty years ago, in December 1978, Deng Xiaoping delivered his historic speech — "Emancipate the mind, seek truth from facts, and unite as one to face the future" — setting into motion the four astonishing decades of reform and opening up that transformed China into the world's second largest economy. 

In 1977, 28 years after the founding of the People's Republic, the country's annual per capita GDP was about $185. In 2018, China's annual per capita GDP is almost $9000, an increase of almost 50 times. While China's development has been rightly called an economic miracle, it is not mysterious — its reform and opening up made it happen. 

In this special series on China's 40 years of reform and opening up, we look to the past to guide the future. We prioritize economic reform, but we recognize governance, development and social reform — and we ask why, after four decades, does China still need to open up further? 

When historians of the future write the long history of China, these 40 years of reform and opening up will surely be a highlight. Indeed, when historians of the future write the long history of the entire world, China's transformational period of reform and opening up will be a feature. 

There are challenges, of course: slower growth, mounting debt, financial risk, industrial overcapacity, massive pollution, social disparity, poverty amidst wealth, global volatility. How to address such diverse, complex issues? President Xi Jinping calls for comprehensively deepening reform and further opening up. How to navigate the "deep waters" of reform, overcoming various interest groups? Lessons can be learned from past experiences over these four decades, including thought liberation and practical actions being more important than empty talk.

For the following four weeks, we explore China's remarkable 40 years of reform and opening up. In the next episode, we discern key factors undergirding the country's extraordinary economic miracle.