The Door Opened: 1980s China: Photography: Adrian Bradshaw

As China looks back on 40 years of reform and opening up it’s time to look back and see how far the country has changed. The youth whose energy and optimism seized the moment with experimentation and invention back in the first decade of the new era built the foundations of an outward looking, successful and confident China today. Consumer goods, food, clothes, hair and much more were beginning to get a lot more interesting in both the cities and the countryside. British photojournalist Adrian Bradshaw came to Beijing in 1984 to study Mandarin just as everyday life was in flux. He would go on to spend three decades living in, experiencing and recording this transformation. Bradshaw settled and married a Chinese and would stay longer than any other overseas photojournalist, bringing an empathy and understanding to his subjects that is rare. In his twenties in the 1980s, Bradshaw was in the company of the young people who drove the reform era and built many of the features of 21st Century China: the artists, farmers, entrepreneurs and industrialists whose enthusiasm and positivity made things happen. This energy that made history is still bursting forth. 240pp English and Mandarin Chinese dual text. Hard cover, thread bound in cloth slipcase. "The 1980s is known internationally as the decade of MTV, big hair and even bigger shoulder pads, but what was it like in China as the country started peeking out through the Bamboo Curtain? The decade arrived just two years after former leader Deng Xiaoping set China on its course of opening up and economic reforms, dragging the country out of decades of isolation and giving its people their first glimpses of the outside world. There was a new-found sense of optimism, particularly among young people, according to photojournalist Adrian Bradshaw, who has collected a number of his striking images from the decade in the photo book The Door Opened: 1980s China." (Adam Wright - South China Morning Post)