“Darling, I have travelled into the future,” read my first mobile text to my wife Melissa. “The Beijing of my mind's eye has utterly disappeared and been replaced by a kind of Hong Kong on steroids.”

My return to Beijing had been prompted by an invitation to help celebrate the 35th anniversary of the opening of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's China bureau.

Within hours of arriving in Beijing for the first time in nearly 20 years, it became apparent that my initial assessment of the city, despatched to Melissa from the back seat of an airport taxi, may have been formed with a little too much haste. Small pockets of the ancient city had indeed survived the Olympic Games fuelled modernisation frenzy and the glass and stainless steel building boom driven by global corporate self interest.

It was, nevertheless, safe to conclude that the dusty, austere and remote city where I had served as the ABC's resident eyes and ears during the turbulent late 1980's was no more.

Gone were the low rise Soviet-style apartment blocks, the millions of bicycles and the drab blue and green Mao-inspired uniforms of the masses. Gone too were the “big character” posters that once urged the people to follow the example of selfless and heroic peasant soldier, Lei Feng; learn from Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping and eat “patriotic” cabbage.

Beijing two decades ago was a city without privately-owned motor cars, the internet or mobile phones and cable TV. The work unit controlled every aspect of a workers life from birth to death. There were occasional reports of camel trains arriving in the city's west. We shopped for a good deal less than farm fresh essentials at the foreigners-only Friendship Store and travelled to Hong Kong for luxuries. Diplomats and journalists not only traded information but also second hand household items and bootleg video movies.

It was a city where foreigners were segregated by culture, language, money, state security and often a suspicion amongst the people of things western. Travel was restricted, police at the gates of our ghetto like residential compound discouraged contact between those inside and those outside. Lift operators, drivers and interpreters were required to report regularly on our activities.

But despite its official ABC “hardship post” designation, Beijing was, ahead of the brutal crackdown of June 1989 on the Tiananmen Square protest movement, a place on the move; a place where history was being made; a good and stimulating place to be.

Beijing was the capital of a mighty power beginning to open up to the outside world and its people were just beginning to shrug off the innocence accumulated over decades of isolation. For the western media China had novelty value. Foreign television networks jockeyed to mount the first live broadcast from the Great Wall, Maxims of Paris opened a Beijing branch and we all interviewed the country's first dollar millionaire.

The wealthiest man in Communist China was incidentally a truck driver who had been freed to build his fortune using the very capitalist means authorised by Deng and his economic philosophy, summed up in a single easily understood sentence - “black cat, white cat, catch mice, good cat”.

In June 1989 after the tanks of the so-called People's Liberation Army brutally crushed the student led pro-democracy movement, the “story” was suddenly different. Deng's ageing, politically out of touch and power obsessed regime had shown the world its darker side. It seemed that, unwilling to brook any challenge to its political authority, the government would have pounded Beijing back into the Stone Age in order to retain control.

The price of the crackdown on the students was the loss of support amongst ordinary Chinese. The government had lost the “Mandate of Heaven” and in response it turned to bread and circuses - spectacular growth and prosperity - to take the minds of those that counted off politics.

The result is the Beijing into which I had been catapulted as if by some Jules Verne style time machine. I could describe the stainless steel and glass towers, the McDonald's, Cartier and Volkswagen advertising and the freeways clogged with privately owned motor vehicles many of then driven by dollar millionaires, but to do so would be to paint a now familiar picture of a modern and wealthy East Asian city.

But, while the built environment of the new Beijing is almost overwhelming, I found a more fundamental change in the city's people and in their interaction with the foreign residents one of which I had once been.

Journalists, western diplomats and local residents now all wear the same brightly coloured brand name clothes, eat in the same restaurants, shop in the same markets and are comfortable in each others company. They share a similar view of the world and speak the same language when it comes to those matters that affect everyday life.

The dark days following the Tiananmen Square massacre when any communication between western journalists and the Chinese people was strictly forbidden are long past. Gone too are many of the cultural, linguistic and economic barriers that had segregated us 20 years ago and, as a result, foreign residents of Beijing have far greater access to China, the Chinese people and the life of the city.

Domestic tourists who now have the financial wherewithal to swarm over the city's great attractions once reserved for travellers from Japan and the United States, chat easily with foreigners as they take exchange photo opportunities.

Totally unchanged is the government's determination to maintain its iron grip on the political life of China and its capital. In fact, if the security during my visit is any guide, the paranoia only seems to have risen to higher levels.

The troops and police across the city and the roadblocks around it, reflected the government's fear that dissidents - Tibetans, ethnic Uyghurs from far off Xinjiang, students, anybody might stir up trouble.

Security was particularly tight during my visit ahead of celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Indeed, at one point the entire city centre was declared off limits to the people of Beijing as hundreds of thousands of troops and tanks “secretly” rehearsed an anniversary parade.

Despite the paranoia, the security, the troops on the streets, the city that stretched before me as I stood on the balcony of the ABC's now very crowded 12th floor office not far from Tiananmen Square looked to me like a city almost ready to rule the economic world. A city steeped in history that had been transformed by raw and unfettered capitalism into a city of the future.

What would those who founded the People's Republic based on hardline Communist orthodoxy think of it all? Are they not spinning in their graves?

“Not necessarily,” suggested my son, Angus, a Chinese history student who was born during my posting and who had now travelled with me back to Beijing. “Many of those who fought for the New China regarded communism as no more than a means to an end.”

“Communism was simply a way of uniting a war torn country and providing it with effective administration,” he said. “Their ultimate aim was to build a modern and prosperous China and a China that had been restored to its rightful and elevated position of the universe's Middle Kingdom.”

If that was true, the old warriors can rest comfortably.