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Red Color News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Through The Cultural Revolution by Li Zhensheng

The very first publication of a rich unseen archive of photographs, representing an astonishing unseen history of the Chinese cultural revolution.

In publishing this new work: Red Color News Soldier, subtitled ‘A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Through The Cultural Revolution’ Phaidon Press have given the world a remarkable book based on what may be the only collection of photographs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from within the post-revolution system.

For the ten years of the people’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966 - 1976) photojournalist Li Zhensheng worked as an official photographer (for there were no other kinds allowed!) for a Communist Party-owned provincial newspaper, the Heilongjiang Daily.

Working Life

In the course of his daily working life, set against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval he photographed a broad section of life – both public and private - as well as important historical events, ranging from unruly Red Guard rallies to the seemingly endless, relentless public denunciations. He was in a privileged position to take photographs within Chairman Mao's rural re-education centres, as well as of many of the prominent political figures of the time.

At great personal risk Li Zhensheng hid and preserved thousands of his photographs in the furniture and under the floorboards of his home, to save this astonishing archive for posterity. To this day, his pictures form the only known existing photographic documentation of the period and mark a high point both in striking photographic imagery, as well as through being an invaluable historical record.

But how did this remarkable book come about? Li Zhensheng released some 20 photographs from his collection as part of an exhibition in 1988, but the rest of his collection has remained unseen until it’s publication by Phaidon. Red Color News Soldier, which takes its name from the literal translation of Li Zhensheng's accreditation as an approved photographer, includes some 300 photographs and documents, accompanied by Li's personal account of his experiences, chronology, maps and extensive picture captions.

Portrait of the Photographer

The man responsible for the striking - and at times distressing – photographs in this volume, Li Zhensheng, was born on September 22, 1940 in Dalian, in Liaoning province. At that time, in the early years of the Second World War, China's three north eastern provinces: Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, were living under the occupation of Imperial Japan.

His father was a cook on a steamboat. When Li was three years old, his mother died and his father relocated the family to his hometown in Shandong province to escape the fighting. There young Li helped till in the fields until the age of ten. His seventeen-year-old brother - a member of the People's Liberation Army – was killed in 1949 shortly before the end of China's Civil War, which pit Mao's Communist forces against the Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists.

Despite his late schooling, Li soon rose to the top of his class. He won admittance to the Cinematography Department of the Changchun Film School in Jilin Province, but his dream of becoming a cinematographer was derailed when overnight the government converted his chosen profession into the more socially and politically useful one of news photographer.

Unhappy at the change, Li complained and as a result found himself kept from accepting a much sought-after position with the official and prestigious Xinhua News Agency in Beijing. Instead, Li found work as a photographer in 1963 with the Heilongjiang Daily newspaper in Harbin, the capital of the Chinese province bordering the Soviet Union. It was here that he first began to hone his professional skills as a working photojournalist.

Harbin – which was occupied by the Soviets following the end of World War II, was the communist centre which bred the revolutionary movement, leading to China's unification under communist control in 1949.

Great Proletarian Revolution

Following two years spent in the countryside during the Socialist Education Movement, Li returned to the city just two months before the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on May 16, 1966, when China's leader, Mao Zedong, gave his support to radicals within the communist party who envisioned a revolutionary social upheaval that would destroy all traces of the reactionary past.

This was to be the beginning of the ten-year period of the Cultural Revolution. During this period Li took photographs for Heilongjiang Daily, which - being an instrument of the Party - supported Mao's movement. Initially, Li, too, supported the revolution, and as a photographer wanted to document the Cultural Revolution for himself and for others in the future.

Consequently, he held back negatives that the authorities would have destroyed. This was in itself a highly subversive and dangerous action – but is the catalyst that has ultimately made this astonishing collection of photographs possible.

The forces that brought about Li's rise during the Cultural Revolution would also be his undoing, and he ran foul of the newspaper authorities almost immediately. Determined to thoroughly document the events unfolding in front of him, he was censured for photographing ‘beyond the assignment.’

Plotted against by rival rebel groups, he was accused of belonging to a new bourgeois class and even of being a foreign agent. On December 26 1968 - Mao's 75th birthday - Li was set upon a stage at the newspaper and publicly denounced, and sent to the countryside for re-education where he spent two years at hard labour.

Denounced

Despite all this, and at great personal risk, Li, even after being denounced, continued to keep his most incriminating negatives in a hole cut in the floor boards of his home, rather than turning over all of his film over to the government authorities as required.

Li first revealed the existence of his collection of photographs in March 1988, on the occasion of the National Press Association's Photo Competition in Beijing, when a selection of some twenty photographs was released. It was then he learned that he possessed not only the first extensive collection of photos surviving the Cultural Revolution, but possibly, the sole one. The exhibition marked, too, a fundamental shift in attitudes towards the Cultural Revolution within China. His never-before-seen photographs — titled Let History Tell the Future — won the ‘Grand Prize’ in the competition.

The book contains a foreword by Robert Pledge, Director of Contact Press Images, and an introduction by Jonathan D. Spence, a pre-eminent scholar on Chinese History and Yale Professor. Li Zhensheng's text in the book has been adapted from interviews carried out by Jacques Menasche.

This book both captures and explains events of which little or no other visual record exists today. Jonathan D. Spence writes in his introduction to Red Color News Soldier: "[Li Zhensheng] was tracking human tragedies and personal foibles with a precision that was to create an enduring legacy not only for his contemporaries but for the generations of his countrymen then unborn..."

Since 1996 Li Zhensheng has been a visiting scholar, lecturing on the Cultural Revolution at Harvard and Princeton Universities. His work, distributed through Contact Press Images, has appeared in Time magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Der Spiegel in Germany, L'Express, Telerama, Le Monde, Liberation, and in Le Nouvel Observateur in France. Li, still a Chinese citizen, is currently engaged in academic research, writing and lecturing.

A major exhibition of Li Zhensheng's photographs was presented at the Hotel de Sully in Paris for 3 months of 2003, before touring to other venues across Europe and internationally. Curated by Robert Pledge, the founding director of Contact Press Images, the exhibition included around 150 of the photographs and documents selected from those presented in this unique book.

Unique

Red Color News Soldier, excels both as a unique historical document – harrowing though a lot of these images are – as well as a volume of striking photography. It is a truly indispensable, one-off source book for anyone interested in recent Chinese history, in the wider modern political field or in the politics and cultural role of photo journalism.

This is the story of a life’s work, as well as being a secret archive of the – largely hidden – inside world of the Cultural Revolution. Powerful, shocking stuff that paints a picture at times joyful, at times sickening, but always emotive, of the human realities of revolution and counter revolutionary zeal. This book will leave you troubled, but astounded. Let history tell the future indeed...

Red Color News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Through The Cultural Revolution is available now in a ‘flexibound’ format - containing approximately 300 black and white illustrations over 316 pages - priced £24.95, from Phaidon Press Limited.

Image guide:

(Top image): Photgrapher Li Zhensheng, holding his Russian made Kiev 35mm camera and wearing a German made 6x6 Roleiflex, pictured in Asihe Commune, 12 May 1965. Photograph taken by Liu Guoqi.

(Next image down): 'On National Day'. Schoolchildren carrying red tasseled spears and wearing Red Guards armbands parade through the streets, past a Russian style department store in Harbin, 1 October 1966.

(Middle image): Red Guards perform the 'It is right to rebel' song and dance - in Harbin, 22-23 August 1966.

(Bottom image): Top Party officials are denounced during an afternoon-long rally in Red Guard Square. Wang Yilun (on the left) was accused of being a 'black gang element' - in Harbin, 29 August 1966.

All images are © Li Zhensheng/CONTACT Press Images. Used with permission.