‘These guys came out of a Shanghai factory on their lunch break. One had a radio with headphones. I love their expressions – the fascination with something new’
When westerners think about China back in the 1980s, they tend to think about one thing: Tiananmen Square. But as one of the few westerners who spent a significant proportion of that decade in China, I think it erases a much more complicated history – a time of hope and optimism that has since been forgotten.
I had been fascinated by China since reading translations of ancient Chinese literature when I was at school, but my interest was in the classical philosophy and language – I had practically no interest in modern China. I studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and we had to spend our second year at a language institute in Beijing. I landed there in 1982. I had no huge enthusiasm for going to a repressive communist state which seemed to be only just recovering from a violent hatred of its own culture during the Cultural Revolution, but it was an adventure.
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