On one frosty Autumn’s night in 1989, thousands of communist evacuees swelled over a fallen Berlin Wall to the embrace of their West German neighbours. With the Soviet Union in ruin, historian Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed “The End of History” – human civilisation had arrived at its final manifestation of democracy and universal rights.  

China, long a punching bag of Western colonial exploits, never sat comfortably with this new United States-led reality.