Even before the world-famous agency Magnum was founded in 1947, one of its future founding fathers, the legendary Robert Capa, traveled to China. In the late 1930s, he reported on the Japanese invasion that plunged the long-isolated and now war-torn giant empire into one of its many bloody conflicts of the 20th century. When Henri Cartier-Bresson arrived in China ten years later, Mao Zedong had already entered the political stage: On October 1, 1949, he proclaimed the People's Republic of China—an event that would have profound implications not only for the country itself but also for the global order in the long term. Since the first journeys of Capa and Cartier-Bresson, Magnum photographers have documented China's political, economic, and social development. Through images that traveled around the world, they followed what is perhaps the most radical transformation in history.