Worker says China is important in his life. Photo provided to China Daily

Worker returned to Beijing as deputy head of mission from 1992 to 1994, then served as New Zealand's consul general to Hong Kong through 1998, and came back to Beijing in 2009 as his country's ambassador.

He says the changes he has witnessed over the past 30 years, politically, economically and personally are so huge that they can be hard to fully convey.

"China, when I first came here, was a place that was enormously inward-looking and it was very, very poor," Worker says.

"And, it was very suspicious of the outside world. It wasn't easy to have relationships with any degree of naturalness."

He says that, up until the 1980s, there was a strong sense that "China knew best about everything and that the world would do well to listen to China".

One of the biggest changes that started in the 1970s and which he says he saw becoming real in the '80s, was that China realized it could learn from other countries, "without giving up what makes China special".

"China has achieved enormous progress. It's phenomenal. It's lifted more people out of poverty in a shorter time than has ever happened. The scale and rapidity of it is phenomenal."