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Liu Heung-shing, veteran photographer for Time and the Associated Press, stands under a pomegranate tree in the courtyard of his Beijing home. He has just edited a huge book featuring 88 Chinese photographers, entitled China, Portrait of a Country. The photos date back to 1949, when the pomegranate tree he is standing under was about 40 years old, smiling (if pomegranate trees are allowed to smile) on the birth of a new nation.

Liu got the idea for the book shortly after China won its bid to host the Olympics. “I began to wonder what people in 2008 would understand about the journey that Chinese people have undergone from 1949 till today. When people get off at the airport they’ll be surrounded by luxury – villas, fast trains, cars, stadiums – but will not necessarily appreciate or understand the road that has lead to today.”

The photographer says he wanted to present as balanced a portrait of the country as possible. In Western media, he notes, “China is either too backward or it’s flooding the West with all these goods and is a threat to its neighbours… at what point does conversation turn into demonisation?” At the other end of the spectrum, Chinese media tend to see “China through a viewing glass that is not always propagandistic, but the Chinese have a tendency to put the best face forward.”

The book takes a panoramic, decade-by-decade look at the nation’s development, from the founding of the People’s Republic, to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, to the Opening and Reform and Tiananmen, right up to its ongoing economic miracle. Even China’s most recent heartrending national tragedy, the Sichuan earthquake, makes an appearance. Liu has spent the last four years pouring over archives, travelling the country meeting photographers and gaining access to negatives. “Surprisingly when I started calling the photographers, I had a very warm welcome.” Many of them already knew Liu’s 1983 work, China After Mao, which was circulated ‘unofficially’ in China.

Between 25 and 30 per cent of the works in the new book have never been published, including one of Madame Jiang Qing, purported to be the last photograph taken of her before she was arrested that same evening. Another shows Chairman Mao with more than a dozen of his personal staff, an image Liu says “would have been impossible to publish during Mao’s lifetime.” Another photo depicts one of Mao’s ‘railway attendants’ in fashionable dress. Elsewhere, we see original images alongside official photographs, such as the Gang of Four at Mao’s funeral, placed beside the official photograph in which the four were airbrushed out.

Born in Hong Kong in 1951, Liu graduated from high school and set off for Hunter College in New York, where he took a photography course that would change his life, under famed Life Magazine staffer Gjon Mili. “Every day at 6pm he would take a shot of whiskey,” says Liu. “He’d slice up a banana and say, ‘Try it with this.’”

Not long after he graduated, Liu got a break when the picture editor for Time-Life sent him on assignment. “He just said, ‘Go! Go wherever you want.’” After a stint in Europe, Liu came to China when relations were normalised in 1978 and helped set up Time-Life’s first Beijing bureau. Liu was 27-years-old when he hit the ground in a city in which great changes were stirring – some of his first photographs were of the Democracy Wall.

“I’ve been engaged with China for 30 years,” says Liu. “Whether the book is fair or balanced, that’s for readers to tell me. I try to do as fair a job as I know how, with the images I have.” He pauses and adds, “Ultimately, this book is a tribute to Chinese photographers.”

China, Portrait of a Country is available from Taschen (www.taschen.com), and all good bookshops.