BEIJING, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) -- All childhoods are special in their own times; linked together, they could chronicle the history of the world. Every child has a dream; pieced together, they could direct human endeavor.

    Five decades ago, the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child was aimed at improving the lives of children. As we recall these past 50 years, we cannot help but wonder about these drastic transformations that have affected both the world and the lives of its children.

    1959-1969: FAREWELL TO WHITE CHILDHOOD

    By the end of World War II, several hundred years after the European colonists first set foot on the African continent, the cradle of the human race had only three independent nation states. Yet total liberation from the yoke of colonial control was not yet in sight.

    Born in 1946 to a relatively well-off family, Rachel Tchoungui, Cameroon's most popular singer in the 1970s, went to MESSA girl's school when she was young. Funded by a church, the school was built around the most beautiful spot in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon. It used to be residents of colonialists, guarded with high walls and barking dogs. They are now used as the mansion of Cameroon's prime minister and as office buildings for ministries.

    In Rachel's memories, her school teachers were all French. Textbooks they read contained nothing but contents related to France. Some of their exam papers even had to be sent to France for grading.

    "We had to know the exact locations of the Seine, the Rhone River, and the Loire River on the map, otherwise we would get punished," said Rachel. "Sometimes I couldn't help wondering why they didn't tell us about the small river in Yaounde where I used to do crab-catching?"

    Singing is the love of Rachel's life. She decided to be a singer when she was seven. However, along with her fellow students, she had no choice but to learn French songs, such as the Marseillaise, France's national anthem. It was during that period that she learned many classic French songs.

    "My childhood, as described by historians, was the black kid's white childhood in the colonial times," Rachel said.

    It all started to be different after 1955. "I remember there were for some time dead bodies in the streets of Yaounde. Nobody dared to collect these corpses. Later we saw big rats on the street, big enough to scare cats away," she recalled.

    Later Rachel was told these people were killed because of their anti-colonial activities. "My father was a full-throated supporter of Cameroon's independence," Rachel said with pride. "And not until I began to read history books did I know something about the Cameroonians' heroic struggles to end French rule and seek independence."

    As the bloody conflicts of World War II drained these Western powers of much of their strength, movements seeking national independence began to surge first in Asia, then spread to Africa. In the year 1960 alone, 17 African countries became independent, and Cameroon was one of them.

    "Jan. 1, 1960, Cameroon's Independence Day, is a date that will forever simmer in my memory," Rachel said. "It was hot and bright that day, and celebrations had already been put on since the night before."

    According to her recollections, the entire city of Yaounde on that day was caught up in a tide of joy and laughter. The national anthem of Cameroon was repeated over and over again.

    "We used to celebrate the national day of France on every July 14, now we finally have our own," she said. "It is certainly the happiest day of my childhood, and of my life."

    From then on, Cameroonian teachers started to stand in front of the blackboards of every classroom in the country, and they began to teach Cameroon's history and geography. "After graduation, I started to perform as a professional singer, and pretty soon, I staged the first concert of my singing career," Rachel smiled.

    1969-1979: MY FAMILY'S THREE MOVES

    With advantageous geographic endowments, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan of China, later called the Four Asian Tigers, began to adopt an export-oriented economic policy which facilitated their fast growth.

    Cho Kyung-hee, professor of the Open Cyber University in South Korea, was born in the small coastal city of Masan in 1960. She lived in three cities during her childhood, recalling that the family's moves were all connected to the country's development.

    It was quite difficult to find a job in war-torn South Korea then, whose economy was badly damaged during the Korean War. Having been jobless for three years, her father finally got employed in a local leather factory. Seeking better career opportunities, her family had to move from Masan to the city of Pusan in southern South Korea while she was left to live with her grandmother.

    Seizing power in a coup, Park Chung-hee, president of South Korea from 1963 to 1979, began to prioritize economic development, focusing first on strengthening light industry and increasing exports. The country's first five-year economic plan was initiated during his presidency.

    "I felt deserted as an orphan when told to stay in Masan with my grandmother while my younger sister was taken along," she said. However, the truth was her father couldn't afford the living cost of so many family members in Pusan.

    In 1968, her family had to move for the second time, from Pusanto the city of Daejeon, also due to her father's job concerns. Cho could finally be reunited with her parents and sisters.

    By carrying out the second, the third and the fourth five-year economic plan from 1967 to the end of 1970s, South Korea had accomplished a high rate of economic growth and a rapid process of industrialization. Despite these grand achievements, development among various industrial sectors and different regions began to exhibit disparity.

    "My father had to work even harder, through days and nights, weekdays and weekends," she recalled. "He went to work every morning before we got up and went back home after we were asleep at night. To us, he was just like an invisible man none of us could see."

    During that period, South Koreans' living standard was still relatively low. "My country in the early 1970s could not produce enough rice, so that the government urged the public to do the cooking by mixing rice, wheat and beans together," Cho said. "Evena fry-up would make our mouths water, and the U.S.-assisted milk powder and bread were rather admirable awards for good kids in school. Those awarded students would carefully wrap these prizes up to share them with brothers and sisters."

    When the clock ticked to the end of 1970s, the gross domestic product (GDP) of South Korea increased by an annual rate of some 10 percent. Financial conditions of the enterprise where her father worked had improved a lot while he himself also got promoted, thus bringing better living conditions to the family.

    The third time her family decided to move, from Daejeon to Seoul, the country's capital, was out of consideration because of the children's education. "Education qualities were incomparable between Seoul and Deajeon. Therefore, my mother took me as well as three other kids to Seoul while my father stayed to work in his company in Daejeon," she said.

    "I was lucky to be alive in an era when the economic status of my country was improved on an unprecedented scale. We could enjoy a better living standard and continue with my study until I received my Ph. D degree in Korea University. Otherwise, as a girl, I might have to get married and become a housewife once graduating from high school," said Cho.

    1979-1989: THE MOMENT OF EXCITEMENT

    While the Four Asian Tigers were celebrating their economic take-off, China was about to kick off an era of long-wished revival.

    After his departure three decades ago from Xiao Guo Zhuang, a small village in China's central Henan Province where he spent three years of his childhood, Shi Yigong, who returned to China from the United States and now the Dean of School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University, traveled back there last September with his wife and two children, only to be haunted by the tremendous changes which have overwhelmed that piece of land.

    "Every family now lives in houses with courtyards, while these shabby adobe houses were forever gone," Shi exclaimed in an interview with Xinhua. "However, these changes could not be matched with transformations that have been going on in the minds and life styles of the Chinese people."

    The most important impact these changes brought upon him was an expanded vision and more opened minds, he said.

    "When I was eleven, a quite sensational event happened in my town: a New Zealand tourist will visit there! It was the first foreigner I ever met and the first time I knew a country named New Zealand. I believe it was also the first time for the whole community," he said. "The town selected two elementary school students as representatives to present flowers, and an acrobatics troupe also performed especially for him at night, with thousands of faculties and students from my school, which was quite funny if it happened today."

    Since China's opening up policy was in place in 1979, hundreds of thousands of people overseas have visited this ancient East Asian country. According to statistics published by China's National Tourism Administration, over 6.7 million foreign tourists visited China, while about 16 million Chinese citizens traveled abroad in the first quarter of 2009.

    The end of that year, when Shi Yigong met the first foreigner, saw the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States. Two days later, the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China convened in Beijing, which was seen as a turning point in the history for deciding to adopt the economic reform and opening up policy. Three months after that, then Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping visited the United States.

    Born in 1967 in the City of Zhengzhou, Henan Province, and a top graduate of the Tsinghua University, Shi might never have imagined that someday he could receive his Ph. D in biophysics at the United States' Johns Hopkins University and become the youngest professor ever in the history of the Molecular Biology Department in Princeton University.

    The restoration of college entrance exams in 1977 was another critical change shaping a new history of China's development. Because of that, thousands of young people could enjoy the opportunity of higher education through hard working and fair competition.

    "The only library at the small town was full of people all the time. They stayed there whole day reading and studying," Shi recalled the enthusiastic atmosphere of obtaining acknowledge.

    Five of his brothers and sisters took the exams in the next few years. Shi himself was later recommended to Tsinghua University without taking the exam. "It's a pity not taking the exam, since it is the very symbol of that exciting moment of history."

    He said that China's three decades of reforms and opening up were an achievement which took many Western powers hundreds of years' efforts and paved the way for a more promising and hopeful future for China's children.

    1989-1999: "MY GOODNESS, THE SOVIET UNION IS GONE"

    China was not the only country which experienced the power of reform. On the other end of Eurasia and almost overnight, the Soviet Union disintegrated, shortly after the Berlin Wall came down.

    "I still remembered the day on which my grandmother came to tell me the Soviet Union was gone, stirred and sad as she was," said Nikolay, a teacher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

    Nikolay was born in Moscow in 1982; one of his grandparents had Ukrainian origin. He lived with his grandmother in a village 120 km northwest of Moscow, Russia's capital. He was less than 10 years old when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Sensing his life would undergo a major change, he didn't know exactly what it would actually mean to him.

    Though too young to comprehend a lot of events those days, he could definitely say that the country had sunk into massive chaos, said Nikolay. "The landslide social transformations confused the expectations of citizens of the former Soviet Union: Some felt satisfied about Gorbachev's stepping down, some were directionless, while others thought the collapsed system would be restored."

    "Under the Soviet Union, my grandmother did receive some retirement pension, about 50 to 60 U.S. dollars, but the market had few commodities to sell. There was only one little store around where we lived, yet what it could offer was nothing but some canned fish. My grandmother and I often had to travel to Moscow by train and waited in long lines for hours for milk, tea, matches and sugar."

    "It all became a different story after the Soviet Union collapsed," he sighed. "We couldn't go to Moscow and buy our daily necessities since we were penniless. We had to plant vegetables and raise pigs and goats all by ourselves, which simply burdened grandma a lot more."

    Life was extremely hard for Nikolay's parents because of unemployment and illness. His father used to work in a research institute under the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union was disintegrated, the director secretly sold the equipment and rented the institute's building for profits, causing the institute to be unable to carry on. Once, his father was so hungry that he passed out on his way to buy bread and milk for Nikolay's little sister, he said.

    Without sufficient preparation of legal and financial regulations and systems, Russia rushed to change from the highly-centralized planned economy to a market-based system, causing a series of social and economic upheavals. These included soaring prices, a high rate of unemployment and inflation, massive currency devaluation and a drastically widening gap between the rich and the poor. Russia's economy was on the brink of an abyss.

    It could be speculated that these changes would improve people's lives, especially children's. However, when dreams were shattered in the face of cold hard facts, one has to wonder about the power of change, knowing it would not always benefit the wishers if they were blind-minded or ill-prepared.

    "'We were born in the Soviet Union' is a song we used to sing a lot in the eighties and nineties. Though I cannot recall its lines, I like the name very much," Nikolay said. "Every once in a while it would touch my memories, making me recall the days of playing with my friends of various ethnicities when the Soviet Union still existed."

    1999-2009: A SMALLER WORLD

    In the fall of 2007, a group of students dressed in uniforms were taking military training at Tianjin No. 1 Middle School. Among these students, a blue-eyed girl was goose-stepping along with other kids, sweating all over.

    Caroline Jounault, a French girl who was 17 years old at the time, came to Tianjin, a municipality in eastern China, as an exchange student. Speaking of her 10-month stay in Tianjin, Caroline said she was quite impressed by the people being so open-minded, optimistic and generous. "It was the happiest moment of my life. I was surrounded by genuine care and love from almost everybody, which is so precious an experience," she said.

    Her mother, Pascale Jounault, was quite sentimental seeing her daughter off at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Trying to dispel her worries, Caroline hugged her mother saying that she could have seafood and French cheese as well as do shopping at Carrefour in Tianjin too.

    "I was born in the city of Poitiers in central France, so small a city where it's impossible for you to get lost," she recalled, "I remember it was in junior high school when I first learned that there is a country called China, the most populous in the world. And it would be spectacular if I could talk to that many people!"

    To her, China was too far to grasp and too mysterious to comprehend. However, changes began to emerge around her, making quiet differences in this small French city.

    In the ensuing years, Chinese restaurants began to do business in Poitiers, and then they could buy more and more Chinese products. Information about China over the Internet and through other media coverage upgraded her understanding about this ancient Eastern civilization right there in her hometown.

    She was even happier when Camille Guerin High School began to teach Chinese. There, Caroline studied Chinese for three years.

    The world at the end of the 1990s could sense that globalization was drawing nearer and nearer. The Internet, once the secret province of science, has become the new town square for worldwide communication, trade and technological research.

    When meeting her daughter after she came back from China, Caroline's mother found her beloved a different girl. "She used to be pretty thin but grew fatter in Tianjin!" She said. What made her even more surprised was Caroline's change of character.

    "She was once a shy girl, speechless and uncommunicative," Jounault said. "Surprisingly, after she came back, she became much more self-confident, and rather calm whenever something happened."

    Caroline didn't stop there. She entered the University of La Rochelle to be a Chinese language major. The university, since the inauguration of its Chinese language department, has attracted more and more students like Caroline for Chinese study.

    Trying to further promote Chinese language and culture, the university co-sponsored the establishment of the Confucius Institute in October 2008 with the Chinese Language Council International. By the end of March 2009, 256 Confucius institutes had been established in some 81 countries, while about 4 million foreigners are learning the Chinese language as well as the nation's cultural heritage.

    The journey toward more changes continues. Last summer, Caroline went to participate in a Chinese language competition called "Chinese Bridge" in China's southern Hunan Province, during which she met her boyfriend Mathias Larsen from Denmark. Afterwards, both of them traveled to Xinjiang with their friends. "I love grapes in Turpan," she exclaimed. "It is the sweetest grape I ever ate in my life!"

    "Sometimes I would ask myself why the world is growing smaller at such a rapid pace? Two people who never have met each other can fall in love in China. That might be the way in which their generation should live," said Caroline's mother.