If memory serves me correctly, wasn’t it Nixon who helped bring China into the modern age? Before his visit with Kissinger, they were riding around in rickshaws and wearing rags.
Nixon had a lot of faults, and they were all personal. But he knew foreign affairs better than any of his predecessors, even Reagan.
His rapprochement with China and the USSR was meant to play one off the other.
He didn't bring China into the modern age, he just made the U.S. dependent on China.
The communists did away with rickshaws.
The impression of the time were vast numbers of bicycles.
It was a very poor country, and still had famines.
Nixon didn’t make a difference on his own. China started to recover from communist poverty only when Mao died, and after the power struggles of the successors ended with the faction of Deng Xiao Ping taking over.
You can date modern Chinese economic history from about 1978.