The year 2018 marks a special milestone in China’s development history—40 years of reforms and opening up. Numerous accounts on Chinese reforms experience have been published in popular media as well as academic sources. China’s reforms produced a unique development outcome in the world economic history in terms of multitude of achievements and scale of benefits they brought. Even without having any idea about the scale of its future success, China’s reforms attracted world attention at the time of its launch due to its political significance in the bipolar cold war international order. Having observed its success over past four decades, policy makers in many developing countries now consider China’s experience as a model to follow in their own countries, perhaps with appropriate modifications.Without attracting the same level of attention, South Asia came upon its first encounter with reforms, a year before China started its great adventure. Sri Lanka pioneered in reforms in South Asia, which later on embraced gradually by other South Asian nations also with varied levels of enthusiasm and success. Having gained the political independence from British Empire around the same period when the Communist Government of China came into power, all economies in South Asia followed a closed, inward-looking, import substitution strategy for nearly three decades. Compared with more open export-driven East and Southeast Asian economies that gave rise to the first wave of “Asian Miracle,” South Asian economies remained relatively stagnant with high rate of poverty among their populations. Sri Lanka, after experimenting with closed, import-substitution strategy for nearly three decades, took the pioneering steps for breaking this policy deadlock by introducing far-reaching reforms. The United National Party （UNP） Government that came into power in 1977 introduced comprehensive agenda of reforms to open up Sri Lanka’s economy by replacing the established model with an export-driven, open market strategy. Reforms and opening up of Sri Lanka—a small island economy of 21 million, cannot easily be compared with a giant economy like China despite the novel experience it provided for the region. Nevertheless, taking Sri Lanka’s pioneering example as the beginning which was followed by other nations in the region too, the reform experience in South Asia as a whole provides a reasonable ground for comparison, especially concerning the outcomes of poverty alleviation.This short essay makes an attempt to review the reform experiences of China and South Asia in comparative sense so that broad lessons for sustainable development and poverty reduction can be identified. It is no secret that in many counts, China’s reform experience produced superior results which could provide a source of inspiration and broad lessons for South Asia as a whole as well as for individual countries. It begins with a brief account on economic relations between Sri Lanka and China. This is followed by an overview of China’s reforms, focusing especially on its impact on poverty alleviation. A brief account on reforms in South Asia with an emphasis on Sri Lanka’s reforms experience comes next. The final section focusses on the broad insights that Sri Lanka and South Asian economies could draw on from the unique policy adventure of China.