News Snapshot:
In 1985, the prime minister Bob Hawke travelled across Australia to Perth to greet the highest ranking Chinese Communist Party official ever to visit this country at that point. Hu Yaobang was party chairman and viewed back then as the likely successor to supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping. It was a five-day good-will visit that would redefine relations between Australia and China and underwrite Australia's prosperity for the next four decades. What a different time it was. The eyes of the world were on Hu's visit, with the Washington Post reporting: "It is a safe trip, with little chance of anything...
