A Photographer’s Quest to Reverse China’s Historical Amnesia

By Amy Qin

A rally at a stadium in Harbin, China, in 1966, attended by the photographer Li Zhensheng. A Communist Party secretary and the wife of another official were denounced and splattered with ink.

HONG KONG — The photographer Li Zhensheng is on a mission to make his fellow Chinese remember one of the most turbulent chapters in modern Chinese history that the ruling Communist Party is increasingly determined to whitewash.
“The whole world knows what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said. 

“Only China doesn’t know. So many people have no idea.”
Clad in a dark blue photographer’s vest, Mr. Li, 78, spoke in a recent interview in Hong Kong, where the first Chinese-language edition of his book “Red-Color News Soldier” was published in October by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.
Blending history and memoir, the photo book compiles images taken by Mr. Li in the 1960s when he was working at a local newspaper in northeastern China. 

Since 2003, the photos have been exhibited in more than 60 countries, bearing witness around the world to the Cultural Revolution — the decade-long turmoil that unfolded from 1966 and turned students against teachers, sons against fathers, and friends against friends.
With the new edition of his book, Mr. Li joins the small ranks of Chinese who survived the excesses of Mao Zedong’s rule and are determined to challenge the official historical narrative at a time when a new dictator -- Xi Jinping -- has pushed to suppress criticism of his party’s traumatic past. 

Under Xi’s rule, the authorities have waged a broad ideological crackdown on dissenting voices, making efforts to objectively chronicle history fraught with risk.

A 5-year-old girl, Kang Wenjie, center, performed a “loyalty dance” for Red Guards in Harbin in 1968.

In China, the Cultural Revolution has become a taboo topic and officials there have repeatedly blocked Mr. Li’s attempts to publish the photos. 

The new edition of his book can be distributed only within the semiautonomous city of Hong Kong, but that has not dampened his hopes of getting copies of it into the Chinese mainland.
“We’ll bring the books into the mainland one by one,” Mr. Li said. 

“It’ll be like ants moving house.”
After Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, what began as a political campaign aimed at reasserting control at the top soon became a sweeping nationwide movement that shook all levels of society. 

Rival groups of militant youth known as Red Guards fought against one another and against perceived “class enemies,” including intellectuals, officials and others.
Tens of millions of people were persecuted. 

Up to 1.5 million died as a result of the campaign. 

Many were driven to suicide.
“No other political movement in China’s recent history lasted as long, was as widespread in its impact, and as deep in its trauma as the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said.
He added that he was concerned that without a deep historical reckoning, something similar could happen in China again. 

Already, Xi’s efforts to elevate himself to the status of Mao and extend his rule indefinitely have for many evoked the days of one-man rule, when Mao was worshiped like a god, culminating in the disaster that was the Cultural Revolution.

Pilots in the People’s Liberation Army reading from “Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong,” also known as “The Little Red Book.”
Mr. Li’s collection of photos from that time is a nuanced portrayal of both the pain and the passion that the movement generated. 

At a time when cameras were scarce, he was given rare access to official events, taking more than 30,000 photos, many of which he carefully stashed under the floorboards of his home in the city of Harbin.
Among those are scenes of Red Guards forcing monks at a temple to denounce Buddhist scriptures and tearing out an official’s hair because he was deemed as too closely resembling Mao. 

There are people shouting praises to Mao as they swim in the Songhua River. 

There are many images of officials and ordinary folk, some standing on chairs, some splattered with black ink, many bowing their heads, and all at the mercy of massive crowds denouncing them for supposed crimes, sentencing them to hard labor or taking them away for execution.
Mr. Li’s photos first gained widespread attention abroad in 2003, when he worked with Robert Pledge, the director of Contact Press Images in New York City, to publish “Red-Color News Soldier.”
Almost immediately, publishers in China began reaching out to Mr. Li, who had moved to New York to be closer to his children. 

Knowing that the photos had only a slim chance of receiving approval from China’s official censors, Mr. Li and his editors in China made plans for a Chinese-language version of the book that would bury the contentious photos in a sea of text.
But censors rejected the nearly finished book with no explanation.
Livid, Mr. Li sent letters of protest to China’s top leaders. 

One of his main points of contention: In 2000, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter had published a book about her father titled “Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years.”
“I was so angry,” Mr. Li recalled. 

“Why can Deng Xiaoping share his Cultural Revolution experience and not Li Zhensheng?”

People swimming in the Songhua River in Harbin in 1967 while shouting praise for Mao.

Now, more than a half-century after the Cultural Revolution began, there is little public discussion of that period in China. 

The nation’s collective amnesia has only gotten worse in recent years as leaders have walked back efforts to reckon with the country’s modern history.
Last year, the South China Morning Post reported that a state-run publisher had evidently revised a middle-school history textbook to omit references to Mao’s “mistakes” in stirring up the Cultural Revolution. 

And a recent exhibition at the Capital Museum in Beijing featuring historical images taken by photographers for the official news agency Xinhua made no mention of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was not always off limits. 

In 1988, the organizers of a nationwide photography competition approached Mr. Li with a request that would be almost unimaginable in China’s current political climate.
“We can’t have an entire decade of history missing in a competition as big as this,” Mr. Li recalled one of the organizers saying. 

So would he consider submitting his photos to the competition?
Mr. Li won the competition. 

The local news media and observers were stunned by the images, which depicted the Cultural Revolution more completely than had been seen before.
Seeing how the atmosphere has changed since that time, Mr. Li has only become more hardened in his resolve to see his photos published in China.

The execution in 1980 of Wang Shouxin, far left, a rebel during the Cultural Revolution. A guard, right, is handing a single bullet to Wang’s executioner.

“Some people have criticized me, saying I am washing the country’s dirty laundry in public,” he said, using a Chinese idiom that refers to the belief that a family’s problems should not be aired in public. “But Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past, America still talks about its history of slavery, why can’t we Chinese talk about our own history?”
Though his photos cannot be published in the mainland, Mr. Li has given lectures on the Cultural Revolution at several Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University and Peking University.
In 2017, a new museum dedicated to Mr. Li’s life and photography was opened in a small town in Sichuan Province. 

It was part of a cluster of private history museums opened by Fan Jianchuan, a property developer and history buff who, like Mr. Li, has become well-versed in the push and pull of China’s censorship system.
But walking the line has meant making compromises. 

Sitting in his hotel room in Hong Kong, Mr. Li mentioned a new book he had been preparing using photos he had taken in Beijing during the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Asked if he had plans to publish the book, the normally opinionated photographer went quiet. 

He was hesitating, he said, because he was concerned the museum in Sichuan could get shut down by the authorities in retaliation.
“Let’s not talk about the Tiananmen book,” he said. 

“One story at a time.”

Chinese Fifth Column

The new Red Guards: China's angry student patriots
By Carrie Gracie

Ms Yang said the air in the US was "sweet and fresh"

Half a century ago millions of Chairman Mao's Red Guards gathered in rallies in Tiananmen Square to chant slogans and wave their red books of his quotations in a show of loyalty to the ideas of the "Great Helmsman".
The 21st Century successors to the Red Guards are not a physical presence. 

After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the tragedy of the Beijing massacre in 1989, young people are not allowed to demonstrate in China.
But some now hound their enemies online. 

The underlying rage is reminiscent. 

The instinct for intimidation is the same. 

Despite all its strengths and all its engagement with the world, China is once again prey to political groupthink and fear.
The latest trigger is a speech by a Chinese student at an American campus. 

On 21 May, at an official event, Shuping Yang praised the fresh air and freedom of speech she had found at the University of Maryland.
The video clip of her speech quickly went viral and triggered an outpouring of anger from fellow Chinese students in the US and critics at home. 

Shuping Yang swiftly apologised.

But that was not enough to stop the flood of "I am proud of China" posts accusing her of lies and deception, or the online "human flesh searches" to dig up incriminating information about her and her family.
Of course there are also some reasons to be proud of China.

The Red Guard was Mao Zedong's ideological youth movement to "purify" the Communist Party

But being proud of China does not mean denying another Chinese citizen the right to an opinion. 

The irony is that the very backlash against her has only served to make her point about the want of freedom of speech in her homeland. 

It has also highlighted a conflict between a commitment to free speech in Western countries that host large communities of Chinese students and the paranoid determination of the Chinese government that free speech should be limited when it comes to talking about China, even beyond Chinese borders.
Freedom of speech is any society's feedback loop. 

It means precisely the freedom to say what is different or what may even offend. 

Of course, different societies have a different view on how much of this is appropriate. 

But China's freedom of speech goes no further than parroting the leader and attacking those who dare to speak from a different script.

Shuping Yang praised the fresh air and freedom of speech she had found at the University of Maryland.

Which brings us to Xi Jinping and his style of leadership. 

Xi's power comes from being leader of the Communist Party and since taking up that role five years ago, he has collapsed the distinction between party and government and dramatically shrunk the space for freedom of speech.
All public debate, whether in the media, academia, the legal profession or online, is a shadow of what it was in 2012. 

It is now off-limits to discuss universal values and liberal democracy. 

Instead China must loudly unite around the leadership of the Communist Party and "tell China's story confidently".

In Xi Jinping's first five-year term, China has become the world's second-largest economy and an increasingly powerful military power. 

But when Xi urges journalists, think-tanks and diplomats to "tell China's story confidently" he does not mean tell it how you like and with your own nuance. 

Students abroad are a particularly important voice in this chorus. 

It is stated Chinese government policy to "assemble the broad numbers of students abroad as a positive patriotic energy".
And so when the University of California San Diego announced that it would host a speech by Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama next month, the local Chinese Students and Scholars Association consulted with diplomats and threatened "tough measures to resolutely resist the school's unreasonable behaviour". 

At Durham University in the UK, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, again with the support of the Chinese embassy, attempted to bar from a debate a critic of China's religious policies and human rights record.

The Dalai Lama frequently gives speeches at universities around the world

This week's mobilisation against Shuping Yang, complete with commentaries in leading state media, is part of this drive for "positive patriotic energy".
All of which causes some bafflement on the campuses concerned. 

Students from countries with a tradition of free speech may feel irritation with someone who criticises their homeland in a public speech, but their instinct is usually to shrug it off or make a joke. 

Likewise when Chinese state media deploy students from Western countries praising China and its policies, such individuals do not become hate figures for outraged student associations or national newspapers.

Years after the real events, China saw Cultural Revolution-themed restaurant

That's because liberal societies take differences of opinion for granted. 

In the US, in Europe and in Australia, citizens regularly excoriate their own governments and praise other countries in the media, and on satirical TV and radio shows. 

They also mount protests against their leaders.
It is vital to Beijing that these habits should not rub off. 

So in Xi's era the numbers of Chinese students studying abroad is going up but their tolerance of diverging views on China is going down.
In one respect, this is puzzling. 

At great expense, young Chinese have chosen to move from the confines of China's tightly-controlled education system to the "fresh air" of campuses which cherish tolerance and which offer all the tools to explore a range of different narratives of their own place in the world through reading and debate. But it is not so puzzling if you factor in these students' prior ideological education, the pressure on them to perform academically, and the ever-present and watchful eye of the Chinese state.

Tension is likely to grow between the liberal values of Western campuses and the "positive patriotic energy" of the growing numbers of Chinese students on these campuses. 

But the very strength of the reaction to Shuping Yang's freedom speech ensures that her words will continue to echo.
After all, it's not just Western culture which honours a loyal opposition. 

It is firmly entrenched in the historical memory of China too. 

Respect resonates down through the centuries for officials and soldiers in the imperial and the more recent Communist era who braved banishment or death for daring to speak truth to power.

Remember that in all great civilisations, the patriots whose memories endure are often those who love their country enough to point out its flaws.

His students beat him to death during the Cultural Revolution. The school called it a suicide

'Official' cause of death: Suicide. But one researcher uncovers how victims of China's Cultural Revolution really died
By Violet Law

A photo taken in June 1966 shows Red Guards, along with high school and university students, waving copies of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book as they parade in Beijing's streets.

Wang Youqin in her Chicago home, looking through her collection of materials on the Cultural Revolution, including the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece that chronicled the purges.

For half a century, Cheng Zhangong has mourned his father’s passing but didn’t want to dwell on how he really died — at the hands of Cheng’s high school classmates.
To this day, Cheng still remembers finding his father, a high school vice principal, slumped over a sandbox steps away from his old office after being beaten with long sticks by his own students. “Almost overnight they turned against my father,” said Cheng, 69, whose dry eyes belied pain.
“I understand they were under the influence of the political system.”
The purges that defined the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago, in August 1966.
Youth mobs, buoyed by idolatry for Mao Tse-tung, threw themselves into a crazed campaign as Red Guards.
In colleges and high schools throughout the country, they repudiated their teachers and principals as “capitalists” or “stinking intellectuals” and pressed them into service as laborers.
On one oppressively hot day in the month that the purges began, Cheng’s father was made to sweep the school grounds for hours without being allowed a sip of water.
When he paused to rest, he took a beating from the Red Guards.
When Cheng intervened, his classmates kicked him and chased him away.
The next morning his father collapsed into a coma after predawn cleaning duties and died.
By the time the dark decade ended in 1976, more than 1.7 million others would have perished.
“For many years, my family didn’t dare talk about this,” said Cheng, who couldn’t bear to set foot on his high school campus, a few blocks from his home, let alone to broach the subject of his father’s beating.
Not until a few years ago, when he chanced upon a website that said his father had committed suicide out of guilt.
Under the name of the “Chinese Holocaust Memorial,” the site keeps a running list of victims of the purges in the academe.
Determined to set the record straight, Cheng reached out to Wang Youqin, the Chicago-based Chinese academic who founded the site.
Wang was the daughter of two college instructors in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and became a “sent-down youth” — one of the millions of urban, educated teenagers who were exiled to far-flung regions to live and work with peasants during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1966, Wang, then 13, and her sister were sent to the border with Burma to clear wooded areas; her left palm still bears a scar from a pickax.
When she returned to Beijing 13 years later, in 1979, to enroll at Peking University, Wang learned that several of her high school teachers, and a few professors from her university, had died.
She set out to learn more about the circumstances of their deaths, each of which was officially deemed a suicide.
She discovered that the classroom where she used to attend lectures over the chirpings of passing sparrows had been awash with the blood of a Russian-language lecturer, who slit his wrist with a razor to end the pain of persecution.
By day, he was subjected to humiliating “struggle sessions.”
By night, he was corralled with a dozen other faculty members into the classroom, where they slept on dirt floors covered with loose straw.
Only by tracking down the faculty member who had slept next to this instructor did Wang learn how he had taken his life.
Among the first to perish in the purges was Wang’s high school principal, Bian Zhongyun.
She was pummeled with baseball bats and table legs and scalded with boiling water.
Even as she lay unconscious on the steps outside a dormitory building, some students kicked her, accusing her of playing dead.
By the time she was transported to the hospital, her body was already in rigor mortis. Wang learned all this from Bian’s husband, who saved Bian’s blood-soaked clothes.
Over the years, Wang has expanded her inquiry to include several hundred more educators targeted during the Cultural Revolution.
In the late 1990s, while teaching Chinese at Stanford University and publishing her interviews with victims’ families, Wang said, she was stalked by former Red Guards threatening to harm her.
She didn’t relent, but relocated to Chicago to take up a teaching job.
In 2000, Wang launched the website and listed about 800 dead for whom she has names and family testimony, or any shred of information she had managed to glean.
Every week she’d receive emails or letters from victims’ families — until the Chinese government blocked the site a year later. 
In 2004, she published a book in Hong Kong detailing the deaths.
And over the last decade, her three-bedroom condo on the campus of the University of Chicago has morphed into a full-blown repository.
Neatly labeled binders of interview notes were shelved above bound volumes of fraying pages of People’s Daily from the 1960s.
Every summer, Wang travels back to Beijing to teach Mandarin while continuing to seek details of the deaths.
So far, she has conducted more than 1,000 interviews with family members of the victims.
Her persistence has pierced the official silence enforced by the Chinese government.
As time goes on, the families of those who died are more willing to open up.
Cheng, for one, sent Wang a six-page witness account detailing his father’s demise down to his last breath.
She previously had only the school’s official history to go by.
“A number of cases have emerged with more details and clarity because more family members of the victims have come forward,” said Wang.
“While I can’t change anything, what I can do is to record the facts about the victims. Because for so long they’ve been absent from official history, the Cultural Revolution has been sanitized into a political event and rendered as victimless.”
Two years ago, one of Wang’s schoolmates and the daughter of one of communist China’s founding generals, Song Binbin, apologized for her role in Bian’s beating death.
But so far, she has proved to be the exception.
Even at the half-century mark, the central government has yet to give a public account of what happened.
And the only museum that commemorates the victims, founded by retired local officials in a small southern Chinese town a three-hour drive from Hong Kong, has over the last few months been cloaked with banners of Communist Party slogans — apparently on government orders, according to media reports.
“Why did it become such a taboo even 50 years later?” Wang asked. 
“It were as though, if we never talked about it, then it never happened. Who is the Chinese government kidding?”
Roderick MacFarquhar, a Harvard historian who has written extensively about the revolution, said absent any official account or public acknowledgement of their loss, the victims’ families can find some solace only in Wang’s efforts.
“This is a way to memorialize the victims,” said MacFarquhar.
“The families want justice, and some kind of recognition of the tragedy.”
Even though the Cultural Revolution raged all over, the region of Guangxi, on the country’s southern border, saw the heaviest death tolls — 86,000 to 150,000 by some estimate — and is unique in having internal official accounts about what transpired there.
A historian at the library of Cal State Los Angeles, Song Yongyi, recently published those accounts online — all 7 million characters detailing county-by-county killings.
Since the 1990s, Song has been building a database on the Cultural Revolution by compiling any material he could find.
In 1999, he was detained for five months in China on allegations of stealing state secrets. 
But he remains undaunted.
“What I want to do is to restore to the people in the People’s Republic the right to know,” Song said.
Revealed in Song’s recently published documents is a hilltop burial ground, a rare resting place for the Cultural Revolution dead that still exists.
More than a dozen unmarked graves lie scattered across this partially cleared outcrop, which at the time was a cattle farm supplying a nearby high school.
Shielded by eucalyptus trees and waist-deep cogon grass, each grave is a dune-shaped pile of crushed rocks and caked mud about 3 feet tall.
Nearly all are without a tombstone or any marker, and appear unattended.
Locals said rice paddies have fallen fallow to make way for roads.
The clanging of a lone earthmover echoed in the air.
There is little doubt that these last physical markers of the Cultural Revolution dead will soon be flattened — and forgotten.