News and information fuel so much of life today that it is essential to have a rounded view of the contemporary world tailored to the requirements of individual and national as well as global interests.
It is in that spirit that this newspaper has decided on a major expansion of its international coverage with the appointment of an Asia Correspondent, based in Beijing. Conor O'Clery's despatches, which begin today, will bring to life for an Irish readership one of the great transitions of our epoch, as China opens up politically and economically to the rest of the world and a rapidly changing and more prosperous Asia becomes increasingly influential in world affairs.
Over the fifteen years since they were first put in motion, the economic reforms associated with Deng Xiaoping have engineered enormous changes in China. Hundreds of millions of its people have been drawn into the process, as its eastern seaboard provinces have developed a market economy with extraordinary rates of growth.
Living standards have soared, but so also have income and regional inequalities, leading to fears about the capacity of the political system to hold the country together. The distinctive combination of market reforms and continued one party rule by the communists that has characterised the Chinese process, has endured several major crises, most notably the Tiananmen clashes in 1989.
Since then the ideology of nationalism, always an important element in Chinese communism, has assumed even more prominence, partly in compensation for the erosion of communist values. This trend will reach its apotheosis next year with Britain handing back Hong Kong to China, a crucial affirmation of Chinese sovereignty and a symbol for all of Asia that the long colonial period has come to an end.
Running through these events will be the end game of the long political transition beyond Deng Xiaoping, which will be highlighted in two important conclaves next year - the National People's Congress in the spring and the Communist Party's 15th Congress in the autumn.
Inevitably, given this demographic weight and its growing wealth and power, developments in China will increasingly affect its Asian neighbours and the rest of the world, Ireland included. It is therefore an appropriate time to deepen our knowledge of the region. Asia is far more diverse and far less integrated than Europe, but it is growing together rapidly and developing a more coherent identity. Developments in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia and Burma have become more newsworthy and salient for readers of this newspaper, whether they concern political issues such as democratisation and human rights, or the economic growth that has brought a number of these states into the developed world in little more than a generation.
This assignment is on a vast, but a fascinating canvas which is full of human interest and capable of broadening our awareness of the contemporary world.