China has been transformed beyond recognition since the ruling Communist party decided 30 years ago this week to abandon Maoism, build a market economy, and dismantle the "bamboo curtain" that had isolated the country from most of the world. This series explores what "reform and opening" has meant to the everyday lives of six individuals.

BEIJING - The carefully calligraphed injunction hanging on the whitewashed wall of old Guo Peiji's cramped hutong restaurant here could serve as a summation of the last 30 years of "reform and opening" in China.

"Taste it and see," the Chinese characters exhort diners hunched over plates of fragrant fishballs or bowls of steaming hot pot. And just as the lunchtime crowd seems to appreciate Mr. Guo's food, the proprietor of modern China's first-ever private restaurant is delighted with the results of his country's economic transformation.

"I have become rich," beams the old man through creased eyes.

He doesn't look it, still dressed in the same kind of black cloth slippers and dark-blue padded waistcoat that his neighbors all wore when they filed into "Please the Customer" that first evening in October 1980 and took their seats at the only four tables Guo had room for to taste his duck.

Today, the customers whom Guo guides to tables in the expanded dining room (between quick checks on the kitchen staff) are all smartly dressed office workers from tower blocks overshadowing the hutong, for whom China's economic revolution is a natural part of their daily lives.

"I came here for a taste of the past, but it is gone," says Chang Ming, who owns his own wastewater treatment firm. "The food is as good, but there is air conditioning now, and clean tables. Things change so fast in China, the past is a long time ago."

When the government announced in December 1978 that private enterprise would be allowed again in China, Guo was a canteen cook in a state-owned factory. "I just went to work and got off work, that was all," he remembers. "This seemed like an opportunity."

He and his wife grabbed it, scrounging building materials and furniture from their work units, raiding their savings to fit out a tiny kitchen, and instilling a new service-oriented ethos into the sons- and daughters-in-law who joined their enterprise.

"Pleasing the customer" was a new concept in 1980, he points out. "We were really modest and polite. Waitresses in the state-owned restaurants were trained to smile but because they weren't in their own business, that affected their attitudes to the customers," Guo says.

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