As you dial, a fresh force is emerging

One reason why so many people are wary about where China is heading today is that many things its leaders have planned and promised have failed to materialize - at least not so far.

Anyone who is aware of the road China has traveled since the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to get to where it is today may feel that when they compare these days with those there are strong similarities. Both were times when people yearned for rapid change, but when it did come it was a bit messier than most had expected.

Just think about how little of a market economy there was then, when its driving philosophy - to let supply and demand determine prices - was allowed to apply only to grocery stores. And just think how strong the bureaucratic economy was, when State-owned enterprise directors complained that they lacked the power to build a new toilet for their workers, and had to wait for approval from heaven knows how many "relevant authorities".

Attempted reform was seen by some onlookers, outside China as well as inside, as a waste of time and energy, trying to reconcile two irreconcilable forces, centralized government and a market economy. They saw it as, at most, a daring social experiment, as risky as any of the nation's previous ones.

Shenzhen, the largest special economic zone in the 1990s, was famous not for companies such as Tencent and Huawei, but for its sex industry.

Lujiazui, which has become the new flashy financial district of Shanghai, consisted mostly of rundown factories and vegetable fields. Because of the city's stagnant ways, locals called it a "dead crab".

I remember sitting at a high-level economics symposium in 1991 listening to a silver-haired professor from one of the most highly regarded universities in the country giving a one-hour speech on just one point: How difficult it might be, theoretically and in practice, to introduce a market economy in China.

It was amazing, in retrospect, that such a huge change did happen when so many people held so many divergent views about possible changes, and when there were many who did not seem to nurse any expectations about change at all.

However, in a large country, once an idea takes hold, it can eventually have millions of people in its sway, driving change like an unstoppable force.

One of the most contemporary examples of this is mobile communications, the smartphone in particular. Of course, a phone remains exactly what it has always been - a phone - but now there are a multitude of dimensions to it, as more than 600 million people in China can attest.