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BOOK
REVIEW
Forbidden images of the Cultural Revolution
Red-Color News Soldier - A Chinese Photographer's Odyssey Through the Cultural
Revolution by Li Zhensheng
Reviewed by James Borton
 Photography
literally means "writing with light", and in a stark and illuminating book, Red-Color
News Soldier, photojournalist Li Zhensheng has focused a meticulous
documentarian's light on those thousands of forgotten Chinese faces swept up in
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966-76. Many photographs of the
period did not survive, but this unique 285-image set of black-and-white photos
documents the dark chapter of social upheaval in the Middle Kingdom - as well
as the painful history of the man who took them.
The images were among more than 300,000 negatives - Li's record of 10 years'
work - hidden under the floorboards of his apartment in Harbin, in northwest
China's Heilongjiang province. Li's work eventually was recognized and honored
in China in 1987; now the  images
have been published by Phaidon Press, an international fine-arts publisher.
Li, once a passionate Maoist, had eagerly joined the Red Guards, and as a
passionate photojournalist he also saw his entre into the ranks of zealots as
his access to moments of history. He even organized his own group of Red Guards
but fell victim to a power struggle at the newspaper where he worked. A
competing group of Red Guards ultimately denounced him, and he and his wife
were sent away to two years of day-long manual labor and nighttime Maoist study
in a "re-education through labor" camp on the way to the forbidding and
freezing Soviet border. They left their young son behind.
Li, now 63, writes about witnessing and photographing an execution of seven men
and one woman. "The victims were condemned as [counter] revolutionaries. One
was named Wu Bingyuan, and when he heard the sentence, he looked into the sky
and murmured, 'This  world
is too dark'; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them."
As a diligent young photographer then in his 20s, Li worked for the
Heilongjiang Daily, the leading newspaper in Harbin. His assignment: to
chronicle the smiling, righteous and victorious faces of Mao Zedong's
cataclysmic insurrection. Never mind that Mao, the Great Helmsman, and his
cadres from their victory over the Nationalists in 1949 onward had already set
the country reeling backward. The Great Leap Forward, 1955-59, caused a famine
that killed 20 million in the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to modernize
and boost grain production.
Red Guard journalists: Red-Color News Soldiers
By the mid-1960s, Li, and other young Red Guards proudly displayed their
armbands as badges of loyalty to Chairman Mao. Journalists in Harbin were
called Red-Color News Soldiers - red being the color of revolution. They were
among the cast of millions in the Middle Kingdom's theater of endless
revolution.
Li's fading black-and-white photographs bear witness to the revolution's
execution squads at work, to counter-revolutionaries being led away to
"re-education" labor camps, public denunciations by young, zealous Red Guards
and patriotic records of correct political attitudes, captured in militia
drills and local elections of party leaders.
Li memorialized the party in a photograph taken on National Day in Harbin in
1968. It reflects marchers dutifully carrying a statue of Mao on a float
adorned with sunflowers, symbolizing the Chinese  people
following Mao the way flowers turn to follow the sun. Another image shows the
Red Guards performing the "It Is Right to Rebel" song and dance in Harbin in
1966.
Among the most dramatic images are a series of photos of the former governor of
Heilongjiang with his hair slashed in jagged cuts by locally appointed Red
Guard leaders.
Li explains how in order to record these images, and to survive as a
photographer, he had to enlist in the Red Guard, thus giving him official
access.
"I noticed that people wearing a Red Guard armband could take photographs
freely, and quickly made up my mind to get one," Li said. "After the Cultural
Revolution began ... the headquarters supported our group. We were recognized
as the real rebels. They even gave us a new name - Red-Color News Soldiers -
and an armband with characters copied from Mao's own calligraphy," he explained
in his emotional autobiography accompanying the photos.
During the Cultural Revolution, Li said, photojournalists were not to take any
"negative" images of any of the denunciations and condemnations - and certainly
not executions.
Thousands of negatives stashed under floorboards
In a power struggle at his newspaper in the autumn of 1968, Li was denounced by
name by competing, "redder" and more revolutionary Red Guards. In disgrace and
fearing the consequences, Li cut a hole in the floorboards of his apartment and
stashed thousands of negatives - a dangerous move since he, his wife and young
child shared the flat, without heat, water, electricity or a toilet, with
several other families. They too could have denounced him.
Robert Pledge, director of Contact Press Images and the book's photo editor,
says, "Li took a huge risk by hiding and preserving this work. This is a
controversial visual record of an infamous, misunderstood period of modern
history that has been largely hidden from the public eye, both in China and
abroad."
Li's photo journey chronicles more than the millions of lost Chinese lives,
loss of innocence and untold historical treasures destroyed by Red Guards. His
forbidden images capture a deeply rooted secret history of pain and suffering.
Li, praised by the celebrated French photojournalist Henri Cartier Bresson, was
never an objective, cool journalist. He admits that he too was caught up in
Mao's beliefs when the party aimed to destroy all vestiges of a decadent,
feudal, and revisionist past.
For decades, Chinese education and state propaganda have extolled the role of
history in the future of the Chinese nation-state. Mao's Long March for many
still serves as a symbol of the inexorable push and promise of Chinese
civilization. Even the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution are somehow
justified - admittedly by a small minority - as part of Mao's grand vision of
China's greatness. Others, such as Li Zhensheng, whose surviving photographs
bear disturbing witness to the xin shiqi (new age), are not so
uncritical.
Li finally was rehabilitated and invited to rejoin the staff of the
Heilongjiang Daily, where his life was devastated in a power struggle. In 1987,
China published 20 of his photographs in a collection called "Let History Tell
the Future". It won the grand prize at China's National Press Association Photo
Competition. The award was a way for the Chinese government to acknowledge the
burdens of China's long march to modernization and its destructive cultural
purges - and to honor courageous individuals who told the truth.
Since 1996 Li has been a visiting scholar, lecturing on the Cultural Revolution
at Harvard and Princeton universities in the United States. He remains a
Chinese citizen, free to travel, and is engaged in academic research, writing
and lecturing in Beijing.
In a poignant message from his book, Li adds, "As I enlarged the photographs of
these executed people in the dim red light of the darkroom, I quietly spoke to
them: 'If your souls are haunted, please don't haunt me too. I'm only trying to
help. I'm making your pictures because I want to record history. I want people
to know that you were wronged."
Red-Color News Soldier by Li Zhensheng, Phaidon Press, September 2003,
www.phaidon.com. ISBN 0714843083. Price US$39.95. 316 pages, 287 images.
(Photographs copyright Li Zhensheng/CONTACT Press Images.)
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our
sales and syndication policies.)
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