On 1 October 1949, in Beijing, Mao Zedong stood before a new red flag and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. The defeated Kuomintang government had already retreated to Taiwan, and China was split in two, with both sides claiming to be the rightful government. That moment did not begin China, of course, but it did begin the modern state that still governs mainland China today.

The land itself is immense: 9.6 million square kilometres, fourteen land borders, and a population now exceeding 1.4 billion. Beijing became the capital, while Shanghai grew into the largest financial centre and the most populous city by urban area. Under the Chinese Communist Party, the country was organised into provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, and special administrative regions, a structure that matched the scale of a civilisation that had long outgrown any single court or capital.

Long before 1949, China had already passed through the great turns of history. The state first unified in 221 BCE under Qin Shi Huang, then expanded and civilised itself again under the Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing dynasties. Along the way came paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass, the Silk Road, and the Great Wall. In the 19th century, unequal treaties, the Opium Wars, and foreign pressure weakened the Qing, and the 1911 Revolution ended the last imperial dynasty in 1912.

The republic that followed never found peace for long. Sun Yat-sen, Yuan Shikai, and later Chiang Kai-shek all tried to hold the country together, while the Chinese Communist Party was purged in 1927 and driven into the Long March after defeat in Jiangxi in 1934. Japan’s invasion in 1937 forced the Communists and Nationalists into the Second United Front, and the war’s horrors, especially in Nanjing, left China exhausted but not broken. By 1949, Mao’s forces had won the civil war on the mainland.

The new regime moved quickly. In 1950 it took Hainan and annexed Tibet, and land reform won peasant support at terrible human cost. China broke with the Soviet Union, built its own industrial base, and detonated its first atomic bomb in 1964. Then came the Great Leap Forward, which caused a famine killing an estimated 15 to 55 million people between 1959 and 1961, followed by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, a decade of turmoil that ended only with Mao’s death in 1976.

Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up began in 1978 and changed everything. The planned economy gave way to a market-based system under CCP control, and growth surged. Jiang Zemin oversaw a sevenfold expansion of the economy, Hong Kong and Macau returned in 1997 and 1999, and Hu Jintao took China past the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Xi Jinping, in office since 15 November 2012, has since centralised power and launched an anti-corruption drive that prosecuted more than 2 million officials by 2022.