As someone born in Singapore in the 1970s, I am hardly the person to write at length about the impact of China's reform and opening-up in the past 30 years.

When this country embarked on its sweeping economic and political reforms in 1978, I was just another citizen of a small nation being modernized.

While China rolled out its agricultural reforms and discontinued its communes, I was your average student embedded in a British-oriented education system concerned with passing exams. Like many of my generation in my country, I grew up as a teen enamored and fed with numerous things Western - American pop culture was the order of the day.