Red-Color News Soldier

by Li Zhensheng

The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) remains one of the most catastrophic and complicated political movements of the twentieth century. Almost no visual documentation of the period exists and that which does is biased due to government control over media, arts and cultural institutions. Red-Color News Soldier is a controversial visual record of an infamous, misunderstood period of modern history that has been largely hidden from the public eye, both within China and abroad. Li Zhensheng (b.1940) - a photo journalist living in the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang - managed, at great personal risk, to hide and preserve for decades over 20,000 stills. As a party-approved photographer for The Heilongjiang Daily , he had been granted unusual access to capture events during the Cultural Revolution. This account has remained unseen until now, except for some eight photographs that were released for publication in 1987. Red-Color News Soldier includes over 400 photographs and a running diary of Li's experience. The images are powerful representations of the turbulent period, including photographs of unruly Red Guard rallies and relentless public denunciations and Mao's rural re-education centres, as well as portraits prominent participants in the Cultural Revolution. Jonathan Spence, Yale Professor and pre-eminient historian of modern China, presents a rigorous introduction. In it, he 'Li 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. As Westerners confront the multiplicity of his images, they too can come to understand something of the agonizing paradoxes that lay at the centre of this protracted human disaster.' This book excels as a volume of both compelling photography and riveting historical record. It is truly unique - in terms of both its artefactual value and its deconstruction - and indispensable for anyone interested in modern Chinese history or the powerful cultural role of photojournalism.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Photography, Art, Journalism

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Song · Rating 5 out of 5]

用近距离的原版照片，还原文化大革命现场。题材包括但不限于游行、武斗、枪决、批判、抄家、年仅五岁的“活学活用毛主席思想标兵”，用精装图书当武器的红卫兵派系战场，倒在雪地里的被枪决政治犯等等。

这本书之所以有机会被世人看到，是因为作者利用在中共宣传部门核心单位担任摄影师的机会，出于良知和本能的历史责任感，冒着一旦被发现就家破人亡的风险，把按照组织规定应该销毁的文革摄影底片埋藏在家中地板下面，才让当时的现场被完整清晰地保存下来，让今天的读者看到。这本身已经是一个非常了不起的传奇。

书中的照片相当震撼，对于任何人，直击文革现场是都一次震撼灵魂的教育。而尽管这本书有张爱萍将军题词，史景迁写导读，但目测也没有任何机会，能在中国大陆出版。中国大陆既是文革的发生地，也是受害深重而最该防止悲剧再次重演的地方，然而却偏偏不能出版这本让世人了解文革的书。好在还有香港及其仅存的出版自由。

本书的出版遭遇，可能也说明这本充斥着黑白历史照片的图书，并未完全成为历史的一部分，仍然与当下现实有着迫切的关联。但愿一切不会重演。

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an absolutely amazing and beautiful collection of photographs from a seemingly confusing and very complex time period of Chinese history: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The author was a professional newspaper photographer in China's northern-most province, Heilongjiang, during the time before, during, and after the GPCR. His pictures really do say a thousand words and the book can occupy you for hours. I found myself just staring at each individual face in some of the pictures, which featured thousands and thousands of people in them at a time.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautiful. It is a collection of photographs spanning 1964-1980 in China, revealing a very intimate and unfiltered (however much you can gauge such a thing) perspective of the Communist/Cultural revolution and its reverberations and phases.

Li Zhensheng was working for the Newspaper of his northeastern province, Heilongjiang, and many of the photos are centered around what became a larger industrial city in the province, Harbin, so the perspective of the photos could be said to be limited.

However, they are revealing and magnificent in their content and preserve the humanity and struggle in this most cataclysmic and misunderstood event in China. They are masterfully taken and reveal more than they were likely meant to, due to Li's keen eye and photographic skill.

More than anything, the book reveals the humanity, flaws, struggle, idealism and hopefulness that went into the disastrously failed revolution.

It really expresses the near impossibility one faces in attempting to give an easy description of the revolution, and I find it difficult to try and address them without attempting to take part in the mostly failed dialogue about Communism that goes on in the U.S. The book is a good replacement for that dialogue, serving as a kind of first-hand, or primary source experience, and pumping the humanity and historical reality back into it.

That said, the accompanying texts by Li Zhensheng does the same, granting you a very clear and personal lens through which to view the events and circumstances surrounding these bizarre and tumultuous years. You get a sense of how difficult it was to steer through the choppy and constantly shifting sociopolitical waters of the time, while also getting a glimpse of the specific challenges and confusions the Chinese people faced.

Li's reflections are sparse and direct, but more powerful as a result. At times you want to hear more of his opinions and thoughts on what occurred, and perhaps there are many things he chose not to reveal and kept a distance from due to their gruesome nature, but the photos themselves speak volumes.

This book is an invaluable historical document.

[Kriegslok · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the best book I have read about The Cultural Revolution. Written as it is by a participant who also happened to be a professional photographer and was caught up in the whirlwind of change and destruction the revolution wrought it has an immediacy, freshness and shock value which conveys the reality of the times better than any number of academic works and with very real imagary missing from many a personal recollection. The 300 plus pages of text and contemporary photography tell the story of China during the Cultural Revolution while showing what it meant for one man and his family. It shows Mao clearly the "puppet master of a swirl of destruction" but also the reality that such things cannot be accomplished alone but required and enjoyed the mass participation of millions, especially the Red Guard (a societal Lord of the Flies), in an increasingly autocanabalistic mob rule. This is an excellent and hard to put down tale of human madness, a madness that seems to run as a wave through all human societies at some point in their histories in some form or other.

[Mathieu Totev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful book with great pictures and events I did not know about. I just wished it would have taken pictures of the famine, but I know it wasn’t really a choice back then. Formatting a bit weird also

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history of modern China has always been a decades long fascination for me, and this book is way up there together with Jan Wong’s “Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now” (1996) and Dr. Li Zhisui’s “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” (1994) as a few of my favorite page turners. Although Li Zhensheng’s collection of photos were primarily shot in Heilongjiang province during the Cultural Revolution, one could easily imagine how Mao’s social experiment spread throughout the rest of China like wildfire. Some of the photos, especially the torture of suspected “capitalist roaders” and other enemies of the Red Guards are difficult to look at, but they carry a most important message about how quickly people turn to hatred towards each other by just flicking a few little switches. One could not help but to breathe out a sigh of relief once Li started to talk about the escape of Lin Biao, the fall of the Gang of Four, and the official end of the turmoil. Li reminds us the scars are still there though, and it continues to shape the collective mainland Chinese psyche in the years to come.

[Publius Decius Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This book contains hundreds of pictures capturing the Cultural Revolution in its most vivid and raw state. The pictures are presented in chronological order, accompanied by the occasional additional commentary about the people and the incidents themselves. The introductions in each chapter is sufficient in explaining each of the periods, too.

Few books are able to convey the chaos, violence, or humiliation, whether from the perspective of the peasants, or via the lens of the counterrevolutionary "bourgeoisie line" during the time as well as this book. If I were to recommend one book on the Cultural Revolution, it would probably be this. For a short and more sympathetic account of the revolution with a rural perspective, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village should suffice. Nonetheless, this book and its portrayal and commentary is both brilliant and captivating.

[Fernando Pestana da Costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

During the Cultural Revolution Li Zhensheng was a photojournalist for the Heilongjiang Daily, the leading newspaper of Harbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang, the most northeastern Chinese province. This book is based on the approximately thirty thousand negatives Li shipped to Contact Press Images in New York over a period of several years. The fact that Li saved the negatives instead of destroying them, as instructed to by Communist Party, was, of course, an act of personal courage, but was also a decision of incalculable historical importance. This book is based on those photographs, taken between 1964 and 1980, and the hundreds of photographs here reproduced (all carefully dated and identified) are put into context by the accompanying text detailing Li's life as a young reporter, as well as the larger events of the Cultural Revolution. This extraordinary book is a precious document of the baleful events that go by the name of The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that almost set a millenarian civilization back into a state of barbarism.

[Galatea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy FUCK

Speaking as someone with Chinese heritage and an amateur interest in the chaos and turmoil that so affected my loved ones generations past, this is by far one of the best histories of the period I have ever seen.

The author was a man who documented the period in its entirety, the highlights were sent to be published at the time while everything else, especially the documentation of the violence, mayhem and mob rule, was hidden away for years. An extremely diverse range of experiences of the cultural revolution are depicted here, the good and the bad.

This book is as much a pictorial history of the time period as it is a memoir of the author's own times living on the front lines of the chaos, witnessing it all and expressing it not just in his words, but in these photographs that tell all.

THIS is how you make a popular history that respects the source material.

This is how those who come before us should be remembered.

[Corina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very honest, thorough depiction of the Cultural Revolution in China. This is not the easiest of reads given the subject matter, and the fact that most of these photos would never have been published but for Li's bravery in smuggling the negatives. As my knowledge of Chinese history is very much filtered through a Western/sanitised perspective, this book was a fascinating reading experience from somebody who lived through that history.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book of photography from the Cultural Revolution in China, with accompanying text by the photographer. Very interesting, and eerily unimpassioned, considering he and his family went through all that the book tells.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a photographic journey through the cultural revolution. The author was a photojournalist who kept the negatives that the party would have rather had been destroyed. Fantastic summary of what it would have been like to live through the turbulance.

[Mark Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should preface that I am not an expert on the history of China. But this profoundly interesting inside pictorial documentary of the Cultural Revolution is a must-own for those interested in the history of Communism in the 20th Century.

[Ian Willey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought from The Works on sale at £1 and was well worth reading at that price but not the £25 normal price tag. Quite repetitive but gives a good indication what it must have been like during this period of China's history.

[Alan Tsuei · Rating 3 out of 5]

一本作者親身經歷的圖文記錄，鮮血被照片凝固在白山黑水之間只不過是那十年動亂的一小角而已，事實全貌應比圖片所呈現的更為怵目驚心十倍百倍以上。看完本書就知道今天的綠衛兵與黑衛兵不過小打小鬧扮家家酒罷了，其後主導者的功力更是完全不在同一個檔次之上，權力集大化所產生的瘋狂與失序不僅難以想像更是醜陋無比，數億人的光陰就這樣為了個人私利而白白流逝，只要一天沒被平反，中國歷史就不算真的把這頁給翻過去。 另外，史景遷真的是著名漢史學者嗎？怎麼在導讀中對這十年的理解是這般的浮光掠影？

[Tegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't really "read" this book--I got it to use the photographs in a project. This book is worth owning just for the pictures. They're powerful, and frightening.

[Ianluna · Rating 5 out of 5]

confess your crimes! if martin parr decides to curate a third volume of his photo book series, this has to be on there.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author was a news photographer in China. He writes of how he became a news photographer, and his photographs are a sometimes horrifying document of the excesses of the government.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Narrow, but great account of Cultural revolution, focusing on one person and his northern city. mainly a photographic history, but with enough context to aid the reader right along.

[Aidan Lowrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A high quality piece of nonfiction literature that is as informative to read as it is heartbreaking. The images interspersed with Li Zhensheng's personal account of his life before and during the Cultural Revolution bring a real sense of presence to the time period, and I recommend to anyone interested in seeing real, and often distressing images and anecdotes from this decade of Chinese history.

[Elisala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derrière ce qui semble être un "simple" album photo des années folles de la révolution culturelle en Chine, se cache en fait un véritable témoignage historique, au-delà des photos parfois assez connues, une réalité quotidienne de la folie, l'hystérie collective de l'époque. Sous une forme chronologique, le photographe raconte la façon dont la situation a évolué, du un peu exagéré au grand n'importe quoi, le tout sous la domination du culte de la personne de Mao.
Impressionnant et intéressant.

[deartomato · Rating 5 out of 5]

歷史的記錄很重要，特別是「負面」歷史。
李振盛從1963年在黑龍江日報擔任攝影記者開始，憑藉自述的價值邏輯「我是一個具有叛逆性格的人，一個我行我素的人，一個特立獨行又異想天開的人。我總是依據自己的『逆向思維』作選擇，始終堅信惟有依靠個人奮鬥才能取得成功」，在艱難和恐懼的現實中努力自保生存（既批鬥過別人也被人批鬥），逐漸形成對親歷事件的個人判斷和反思，給後來國際社會展現從四清運動到文革的豐富「負面」底片和詳細一手文字紀錄。
有些圖文讓我在閱讀時忍不住因為過於暴力和痛苦驚叫出來，但歷史至今沒有被公開敘述和檢討。
p.s.極能以史鋻今的封面圖：紀念毛澤東游長江雨週年的活動中，游泳健兒下水前捧讀《毛主席語錄》，以防下水迷失方向（1968）

[Thaths · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read many books of the chaotic years during the Great leap forward and cultural revolution. This book shows you (rather than tell you) what this period was like in a province in China. The photos are made more meaningful by the context the photographer shares alongside them. Without the context it would just be a book of photos of people being humiliated by large crowds of shouting youth.

[Andrea Samorini]

___________________________________
FROM BOOK: Una luce crudele. Fotografia e violenza politica (Susie Linfield)

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

在那次運動中，人們如何相互攻擊以便能夠生存；為何每個人都是受害者，既包括那些被打傷和被打死的人，也包括那些使其他人受苦的人。文革需要被深刻地反思，但反思不是為了秋後算賬，「向後看」的目的正是為了「向前看」。

[中生 李 · Rating 5 out of 5]

结合冯骥才一百个人的十年一书前后看的，算是第一次更深入地了解了我国那段历史。我觉得文革对我们现代中国人最大的影响是，它让我们的信仰断了层，革了我们信仰这一文化的命。于是，迷茫着.......

[Paulina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno de los libros mas interesantes que he podido apreciar.

[Zeitgeist · Rating 4 out of 5]

歷史不容歪曲，誰流芳百世，誰遺臭萬年，是非自有公論

[汪先生 · Rating 3 out of 5]

2023-02-28
7
图像很有力量，读者在黑白中也能感受到血腥与战栗，黑龙江的文革岁月里的残忍一览无余。就本人的自述而言，真挚而诚恳；那段和培奎、莹侠的爱情让人难过。作者把自己的反叛藏在心里，熬到毛死后终于翻身，写了很多中国无法出版的真话。

[Diego Acosta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed it not only for the first handed view of one of my favorite moments jn history but also the pictures he took along with it