I have few regrets in life,
but one of them is that I missed out on the chance to visit China in 1980.
That was when the World bank sent a groundbreaking first economic mission to Beijing.
At the time,
Deng Xiaoping had been in power for two years and was ushering in a new era of market reforms and rapid economic growth.
I was a World bank employee at the time,
but because I'd already announced my plan to quit,
I decided to pass up this extraordinary opportunity instead.
My first trip to China wasn't until much later, in 1993,
but I've been there almost every year, with exception of the pandemic period ever since.
The changes I've witnessed in the three decades since have astonished me.
What was once an impoverished Third world country has become the world's greatest manufacturing and exporting nation and its second superpower.
Along the way, a billion people have been lifted out of poverty and entire megacities,
replete with thickets of skyscrapers, have sprung out of nowhere.
China has been on a truly exciting journey,
and yet in recent years, it seems to have run out of steam.
A burst property bubble, mounting debts,
and increasingly hostile trade relations with the US are taking their toll.
So are the days of double digit growth well and truly over.
Indeed, does China risk a lost decade of near zero growth as Japan experienced in the 1990s?