Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer Prize winner who started and spent most of his career as a photojournalist in China, would feel hard pressed to present a single image that captures the country's 35-year reform.

"It's impossible to show such a course of events in such a big country with one picture," says Liu, 62.

However, less than two weeks before a latest decisive reform package is widely expected to be unveiled at a key meeting of China's leadership, he is well placed to identify a number of key moments in China's remarkable era of political and social change.

Born to a news editor's family in 1951 in Hong Kong, Liu made his first trip to the family's ancestral home of Fuzhou, southeast China, as a three-year-old with his mother, living there till he was almost 10.

However, Liu believes his first visit to the Chinese mainland in a real sense was in the autumn of 1976, one week after Chairman Mao's death. After graduating from Hunter College in New York, Liu, a major in political science and journalism, was given the opportunity by TIME Magazine to cover Mao Zedong's funeral.

He prizes that moment not only because the period is of huge importance in a widely political sense, but also because it turned out to be the introduction of reform that was to profoundly affect a nation of 1.3 billion people.

The young photographer saw the "undercurrents of reform" through simple physical signs. The people practising Tai Chi by the Pearl River in Guangzhou, south China, with black bands for mourning on their arms, for example.

"The changes were hard to pick up, but you could feel their relief through their body language and facial expressions. They didn't look as vigilant as before," remembers Liu. "It suddenly hit me that China had entered a fundamentally new era, which was still undefined."

Liu tells Xinhua about his childhood on the mainland from 1953 to 1961, when people's lives were lived out under a highly charged political atmosphere, a pressure reflected in their acts and attitudes.

He vividly remembers that before he went back to Hong Kong, a send-off ceremony was held at his school's playground with all the students and teachers. He was finally granted a red scarf, a token of elite revolutionary children.

He had been deprived of the honor before, no matter how hard he studied or how well he behaved in each revolutionary campaign, because his mother's uncle was a so-called "peaceful landlord," who, though not the worst of its kind in the age of class struggle, was still among the enemies of the working class.

"That was my first political lesson, and it aroused my strong interests in the country," says Liu.

His belief that politics is the key that open corridors to China was reinforced during his visit to Guangzhou in 1968, the climax of the 10-year Cultural Revolution.

A haircut was refused to him in a barbershop until he had recited a paragraph of Mao Zedong quotations. Later, he and his family queued for almost an hour to get a table in a restaurant, of which Guangzhou had but a few. The waitress just threw the chopsticks on the table and walked away.

"Everybody behaved in a manner that officials liked to call 'vigilant,' because in that era, China literally seemed to see enemies everywhere," he recalls.

But it all began to change systematically in December 1978, when the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China decided to implement reform and opening up, ending decades of seclusion.

Liu was in China then, helping to set up TIME's Beijing office. He was often surprised by the Chinese people's sense of urgency, the like of which he rarely saw anywhere else in the world.

"The people were so impatient. If Chinese want something, they want it now, which is hard to understand for foreigners," he explains.

Liu believes the answer lies in the bitter past of China before reform.

"China's reform is pragmatic, which is based on its impoverished history," he says.

He cites the example of him once standing in a queue for three hours to buy 100 grams of fatty pork during the hungry days of the 1959-1961 natural disasters, when his neighbors suffered from swollen legs because of malnutrition and lack of food.

"Only if you understand China's 30 years of history before reform will you know its leaders' determination to push forward the reform. They don't have a Plan B, because stability and development are impossible to achieve without reform," according to Liu.

Transformations happen from bottom to top. He was also impressed at a formative time in his career by the openness of government officials, who had long been confined within the "Great Wall" of ideology.

In 1980, Liu was among a group of American reporters who came along with U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to visit China. The Chinese side satisfied all the requests of the media from visiting a submarine to interviewing the Chinese Minister of Defense.

As Liu suggested, the American journalists held a dinner party in Shanghai to treat the Chinese media official. To their surprise, Wu Xiuquan, then deputy chief of the People's Liberation Army General Staff, also showed up.

"All the American journalists had never expected the Chinese officials to be so friendly and so open," Liu remembers.

"Actually, reform takes place in every country, but nowhere has it been as influential as in China, stirring the interest of the whole world," he says.

With the reform, China went in little more than an instant from "utter destitution" to a treasure trove that is currently ranked as the world's second-largest economy. Meanwhile, individualism has resumed and gone viral to shake the collectivism-shaped mindset of most people.

By riding out China's economic miracle, many Chinese achieved and enjoyed their own success, like the two trendy female yuppies in one of Liu's pictures taken in 2010. Wearing Chanel sunglasses and confident smiles, they ride a convertible Mercedes-Benz through Shanghai's downtown high-rises.

"That's my impression of today's reform in China. You see how great the changes are in a passage of time," says the man who took that photo.

"It's hard to picture China in another 30 years of reform, but there is no doubt in my mind that it will be the most open country in the world because China is very acceptable for foreign cultures."

Another of Liu's favorite pictures that in some way reflect on China's reform was taken on the campus of a college in Dalian, north China, in 1981. A young man skates by a towering statue of Chairman Mao, with his arms wide open, biting his lip tight and heading in a different direction from the one peered into by the stern-faced statue.

"Once you start something, you can't look back," Liu notes. Enditem

(Yuan Suwen also contributed to this sto