Red Colour News Soldier – Li Zhensheng

A coffee table book with a twist – documenting in often grim black and white photographs the passion, violence and despair behind China’s cultural revolution. Li was one of the official photographers – whose work was designed to support and document the glorious uprising – but which progressively showed the anarchy and utter social breakdown that followed. Many of these photos were kept hidden for years – buried in his garden, then many smuggled out to New York for safekeeping from his compound in Heilongjiang. The book therefore develops as a photo album, displaying early on the peaceful lives of peasant farmers, shots of the great proliteriat ploughing fields and so on – until little by little, we see petty jealousies unfold and revenge sought against age-old grudges as the revolution takes hold and gives the mean-minded a legitimate means of violence against fellow man. The good natured party leader and elderly grandfather having his head shaved for being “an educated reactionary” under the baying watchful eyes of thousands, his utter fear 40 years later still just leaping off the page. The grainy photos of the execution of the frankly pathetic fraudster Wang Shouxin in the snowy wastes of Heilongjiang serve a more explicit reminder of the perils of graft, however it is the ordinary peoples, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as China’s centuries old system of the inevitable have’s and have not’s degenerated into a episode not far removed from total anarchy, that serve as a chilling reminder what what man can do to fellow man in the name of jealousy. Proceed with caution, read with a stiff drink and offer up a quick prayer for Deng leading the country out of this madness.

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