[iwar] New Book: Red-Color News Soldier

From: televr <yangyun@metacrawler.com>
Date: Fri Sep 26 2003 - 20:14:58 PDT

Blood-red lens

John Gittings hails the work of Li Zhensheng, the Red Guard and news
photographer who chronicles Mao's cultural revolution in Red-Color
News Soldier

Saturday September 20, 2003
The Guardian

Red-Color News Soldier
by Li Zhensheng
320pp, Phaidon, £24.95

No one has heard before of Wu Bingyuan, a Chinese worker executed with
a bullet in the back of his head during Mao Zedong's cultural
revolution, but this review of the book which contains his picture
should really be dedicated to him.

We know something about the top Communist party officials who fell
foul of Mao, were targeted by the Red Guards and were driven to
suicide or left to die of illness. We know next to nothing about the
ordinary victims, men and women who defended their ideals against the
Maoist dogma or simply refused to conform to the hysteria.

Wu was one of those, a technician at the Harbin Electric Motor Factory
who, with a colleague, wrote a pamphlet called Looking North. It was
interpreted by the authorities as criticism of Mao's hostile policy
towards the Soviet Union - China's northern neighbour - and the
punishment for this "counter-revolutionary" act was death. On April 5
1968, the photographer Li Zhensheng took a set of official pictures of
Wu's execution, along with that of his fellow technician and six
"ordinary" criminals. The eight were sentenced to death at a public
trial, placed on trucks with placards round their necks, driven to a
cemetery, forced to kneel and shot before a large crowd.

Similar events happened all over China and (minus, in most cases, the
public execution) still happen today. But Wu made a small heroic
gesture that Li's pictures have rescued from anonymity. When sentence
was first pronounced, he looked at the sky and uttered one sentence:
"This world is too dark." Then he closed his eyes and kept them
defiantly shut till he had left the dark world.

This collection of photos, taken by Li in the north-eastern province
of Heilongjiang, where he worked for the official Communist party
newspaper, is unique for a simple reason. Although the post-Mao
Chinese government has labelled the cultural revolution "10 years of
chaos", it still tries to suppress any real inquiry into the countless
human tragedies it caused. After all, the Communist party continued to
rule China during those 10 years, and some of those implicated then
are still in power (for example in Tibet, where they are a serious
obstacle to any settlement with the Dalai Lama). Even today, the
Chinese media are not allowed to recall the tragic stories of those
years - such as the suicide of an opera singer in the Shanghai lane
where I lived until recently. Only my neighbours remembered how the
Red Guards humiliated her on her doorstep; she was found hanging in
the bathroom the next day.

Li was a Red Guard as well as a photographer, and does not deny that
he also led "struggle sessions" against innocent victims; but his
pictures reflect a deeper desire to record and understand. When he in
turn was "struggled against", he concealed the negatives under his
floorboards. He published a very few in 1988 during the more liberal
period before the Tiananmen Square clampdown. Other pictures have
appeared since then, but only abroad: the present album, compiled
after several years of editing with Li's collaboration in New York,
contains 300 photos out of the 30,000 he hid.

The story begins in 1965, a year before the cultural revolution, when
the rural people's communes were already convulsed by a campaign to
root out former landlords and other "bad elements". One "rich peasant"
wearing a tattered jacket bows his head before a huge crowd squatting
in the main square of a small rural town: his accusers sit grinning in
the foreground. A hundred or so other "bad elements" wait their turn
elsewhere under armed guard, in a slightly out-of-focus picture that
accentuates their air of hopelessness.

A year later, in the provincial capital of Harbin, Li films a far more
violent struggle session by Red Guards against disgraced party
leaders. They stand, wobbling awkwardly, on fold-up chairs, with
placards round their necks. One of them, former governor Li Fanwu, had
the imprudence to grow his hair long like Chairman Mao. A young girl,
her chubby face rigid with revolutionary zeal, shears off his locks
and stuffs them down his neck. Li's daughter was offered a good job in
the army if she would sign a document accusing him of committing
incest with her. She accepted.

Another year and the Red Guards are fighting among themselves for
control of a loudspeaker bus. Li photographs a young man on the point
of death, eyes shut and face bloodied. The Red Guards are sorted out
by the army and sent off to the countryside: their random violence is
institutionalised by a new clique of "revolutionary" leaders. Li's
pictures show atrocious acts carried out not in a frenzy but with
stony deliberation. One victim has his mouth stuffed with a glove to
prevent him protesting: both he and his tormenters appear to be posing
for the camera. (Later he officially commits suicide - or is pushed
out of a window.)

Few people smile in these pictures unless they are hailing the Red,
Red Sun in our Hearts (Chairman Mao). There is one important
exception. Shortly before the mass execution at which Wu Bingyuan was
shot, Li gets married. His colleagues playfully drape the newlyweds'
necks with placards like those hung over the "criminals". Instead of
saying "counter-revolutionary element sentenced to immediate death",
the placards proclaim that the bride and groom are "taking the
socialist road".

There was more to the cultural revolution than the violence (which was
most severe during the years 1966-69). We may discuss the often
genuine idealism of the young people who volunteered to "serve the
people". "Barefoot doctors" took basic medicine to the villages; high
school graduates took education to remote communities. We may reflect
on the elements of an alternative road to socialism that sought to
reject bureaucracy and privilege, and impressed many who sought
similar alternatives abroad. Yet these "spring shoots" were killed off
by the stifling cult of Mao and the tyranny of the ambitious and the
ignorant to which he turned a blind eye. Their violence was corrosive
and endemic - not the occasional "excess" for which it was too easily
excused.

This remarkable book, which still cannot be published on the mainland,
is a salutary reminder that, in the Chinese phrase, accounts have yet
to be settled with the past: Li's photographic record ends with a
final chilling scene, taken four years after the cultural revolution
ended. Wang Shouxin, one of the most active "rebels" when it was
raging, is now in turn sentenced to death. Wang does not sound a
lovely character, but was it really necessary to dislocate her jaw so
she could not proclaim her innocence before being shot in the head?
There is an ambiguity here, as Professor Jonathan Spence notes in his
foreword, which means that we - and the Chinese people - still need to
ask questions about their hidden past.

John Gittings recently returned from Shanghai after 25 years reporting
for the Guardian on China.

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Received on Fri Sep 26 20:15:11 2003

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