(Transcript from World News Radio)
Next week marks the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when troops crushed China's student led democracy movement.
Two months earlier the protests had begun not in support of democracy but in commemoration of the death of one the Communist Party's top leaders.
Former party chairman Hu Yaobang was a far-sighted reformer who'd not only shaped China's future economic prosperity, but to a degree, that of Australia's as well.
Marcus Reubenstein reports.
In April 1989, thousands of Chinese students had flooded into Tiananmen Square, the day after the death of the man many hoped would lead China down the path to political reform.
Two years earlier, Hu Yaobang had been dumped as Communist Party secretary but not from the politburo.
Kerry Brown is a professor of Chinese politics at Sydney University, says China's leaders had no choice but to afford him a state funeral.
"I think the legacy of the Hu Yaobang period is going to be that that was a style of politics which did inspire people. Hu Yaobang was an inspiring politician."
Born in 1915, Hu Yaobang joined the Communist Party as a teenager.
He was twice purged and then rehabilitated alongside Deng Xiaoping.
In 1978 Mr Deng became Chinese leader, and made Hu Yaobang party chairman.
Kerry Brown says while Mr Deng announced the policy, it was Mr Hu who was tasked with building a free market economy.
"His ability to take the very, very broad framework that Deng Xiaoping gave of reform and and what a reforming province what it's economy should look like and implement it, mobilize people from officials to the people generally was a great achievement. And I think that's why even now Hu Yaobang is a person who many officials that worked with him respected him deeply and probably the most popular leader in modern China."
Hu Yaobang slashed red tape, attracted foreign investment and opened up trade.
But China's economy couldn't survive without resources
In 1985, that reality brought Hu Yaobang to the Pilbara in Western Australia.
He travelled there with, then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke who remembers him as a visionary but unconventional politician.
"He was a very small man like a little sparrow. One day i asked Hu Chi Li, who was his assistant, I said can I ask you a question. What do you think when Hu Yaobang throws up his brief and goes off at a tangent. He said we are horrified."
Since that visit --- from the land upon which they stood -- 200 million tonnes of iron ore has been shipped to China.
Mr Hawke says Hu Yaobang played a great part.
"I think that the Chinese leadership and Chinese people generally recognise the very significant contribution that he made during his time in office."
At Sydney University, Kerry Brown believes that in death Hu Yaobang's achievements will gain greater recognition than acknowledged in his lifetime.
"Someone who would actually now be remembered as a clean leader without a whiff of corruption about him, I think Hu Yaobang's in terms of historic kind of vision of his status will go up and up. If I put my money on the stocks of Chinese leaders I'd put most of it on Hu Yaobang. I think he's going to become increasingly important in the assessment of what he did in the 80s."
An unapologetic critic of Chairman Mao, Hu Yaobang was demoted in 1987.
His protege, Wen Jiaobao --- who was in the government delegation sent to negotiate with protesters in 1989 -- would become China's Premier.
In 2010, Wen Jiaobao was the first post-Tiananmen Square leader to publicy acknowledge Hu Yaobong's role as China's great reformer.
Professor Brown says Hu Yaobang's revival was complete.
"I think people will look back at him and what he did and they will remember an amazingly courageous man. A man who was incredibly good with the people around him and got their loyalty. And I suppose like in the Soviet Union, like the sort of Chinese socialism with a human face. So I think that's an enormous legacy and if I were Xi Jinping I would be looking very hard at Hu Yaobang and thinking how can I copy him."
