Photography - Isabel Hilton on the final battle of Mao's cultural revolution - documenting history
One sunny spring day in 1974 I took a walk in the Haidian district of Beijing. Haidian is now a high-tech computer district but back then it was still a village in the north-west suburbs of the city, dominated by the campuses of Beijing's two great universities, Beida and Qinghua. It was a peaceful day, the first hint of warmth after the bitter Beijing winter. My mistake was to take a photograph.
The scene was of two women mixing cement. Five minutes later, a man approached and roughly asked what I was doing. His face was tight with indignation and contrived contempt. In his mind, he was the upholder of the revolution, I the agent of capitalism and imperialism, caught red-handed in an anti-Chinese act.
A few weeks earlier, a campaign had been launched against the Italian film-maker Antonioni and his recently completed documentary, China. Antonioni had been invited to make the film by the Zhou Enlai faction of the Communist Party, who were tentatively trying to steer China back to a more moderate track and open up contacts with the outside world. Now they were under attack by the extreme Maoists led by Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, a group later derided as the Gang of Four.
It was one of the last great battles of the cultural revolution, a struggle for power expressed as struggle over image. Antonioni's documentary, the Gang of Four claimed, was a vicious slander on socialism. None of us were allowed to see it, but all were required to criticise it.
The man who had accosted me was a local party official and for him it was the Maoist equivalent of Christmas. He was obliged to carry out the campaign to criticise Antonioni in this village backwater where few had visited the cinema or had ever seen a foreigner. Suddenly, there was a foreigner, taking a photograph. He set the machine in motion.
I was marched to the local street committee headquarters, followed by an excited crowd who packed into the dark room and my struggle began:
"Why did you deliberately come to this run-down area to take an anti-Chinese photograph?"
"To show the world that in China women are equal to men." (It was the best answer I could think of.)
"Give us your film." (When I made to hand it over, it was refused.)
"Don't think you can get off so lightly."
Then the whole round of questions began again. I realised it would continue in this circular vein until everyone in the room had demonstrated his or her revolutionary indignation. No explanation from me was sought or accepted. My guilt was pre-ordained. All that mattered to the participants was that they would not be accused later of failure to defend the honour of the fatherland or the revolution. They hurled their accusations as though their lives depended on it.
My small ordeal lasted only three hours before the security police intervened and took me back to my university in disgrace. But it taught me a number of lessons about Chairman Mao's cultural revolution: first that if you were a target, there was no escape through reason or argument or appeal to fact. It was a process that needed victims and most, unlike me, suffered violence as well as humiliation. Hundreds of thousands were beaten, some killed, others sent to labour camps for real or imagined offences against Mao's thought.
Some were party officials, since one of Mao's purposes was to destroy the party that had tried to retire him and to replace it with one unquestionably loyal to him. Others were simply local scapegoats, victims of every campaign launched after 1949. If you had a political black sheep anywhere in the family, if you had owned a little more land, if you spoke a foreign language you might have been criticised in the Socialist Education Movement. From then on, you were likely to be the victim of the next one. Of all of these movements, though, the cultural revolution claimed the widest cast of victims: intellectuals, writers or artists, teachers, university professors, actors, film directors, doctors, party officials, high and low - the list is almost endless. The event itself and its aftermath, from the first wall poster in Qinghua University in 1966 until the death of Mao ten years later, remains one of the most complex and opaque events of the 20th century.
The simplest narrative of the cultural revolution is that Mao had been sidelined as a result of the disastrous Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the mass starvation that followed - in which up to 30 million people died. Unable to control the party any longer, Mao turned to the young, the students and the schoolchildren, and urged them to rebel against those in the party who were "taking the capitalist road". They responded with a fervour that is still unthinkable. They smashed temples and schools, they forced their teachers to parade in dunce's caps, they sent high party officials off for reform, after subjecting them to brutal public humiliation. Soon they had formed factions and were fighting each other. At that point, Mao sent in the army and packed the revolutionary youth off to the countryside to learn from the peasants. They went off singing. Many of them never managed to return.
For the outside world, China had descended into madness. There were few foreigners outside the diplomatic community, and even long-term travellers ended up in jail, accused of espionage or revisionism. Reports of what was happening in China were fragmentary and confusing. Images were rare. Inside China, the picture was scarcely less confused.
Thirty years on, there is barely any visible trace in China of the cultural revolution - except for the damage to thousands of Buddhist statues, and the absence of many more. The cultural revolution has been repudiated as "ten years of chaos" and blamed on the disgraced Gang of Four. Mao's corpse is still in its mausoleum in Tiananmen Square but the giant statues - and religious fervour that marked the high tide of his personality cult - are gone.
The scars - on the victims and their families, on those who now wonder at the barbaric things they did as young Red Guards, and on the party itself - remain, but are hidden. The revolutionary songs that used to be compulsory, the Mao badges and Little Red Books are now discarded as embarrassments or collected as kitsch. Most who lived through this time would rather forget it. The majority - the generations born since 1976 - have only the dimmest idea of what happened. A few, perversely, have tried to aestheticise it as the world's greatest artistic "happening". Rarest of all are those who both remember and are prepared to examine it.
Li Zhensheng is in this last category. A young photographer in Harbin at the time, he steadily documented the evolving madness around him, showing only the images he knew were officially acceptable: workers and peasants eagerly studying the works of Mao; Red Guards performing revolutionary songs; formal meetings called to denounce a "capitalist roader". The rest - the brutal scenes, the executions, the destruction of libraries and the punishment and humiliation visited on the victims, the elderly monks forced to denounce their beliefs, the smashed Buddhas and the burning books - he hid under the floorboards of his house. By the end, Li had 30,000 negatives hidden away. It has taken this long for him to feel that it is safe to begin to publish them. Published together for the first time, in Red-Color News Soldier, alongside his own testimony, they give an extraordinary picture of one of the most bizarre, complex and catastrophic episodes in China's history.
Red-Color News Soldier, with an introduction by Jonathan D Spence, is published this month by Phaidon (priced £24.95)
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