Title : China, Portrait of a Country
Publisher: Taschen, 2008
Editors: Liu Heung Shing

From fairytales to fables to sci-fi, taking a glimpse into life in distant lands has always been an important ingredient in most literary pieces. As we dream of lands far far away, the author takes the reader on a semantically-driven journey and the reader creates their own visions of how that place looks. Unveiling the recent years of China’s history through photographs brought editor Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist with the Associated Press and Time Magazine, together with contributing authors James Kynge and Karen Smith to show us 60 years of life in China, Portrait of a Country.



For much of the 20th Century, looking in on life in China remained shrouded by a curtain of control; the images that a good portion of the world envisioned were carefully selected images and written accounts. Liu compiled photographs from 88 Chinese photographers who, through their lenses, tell stories of China spanning from 1949 to 2008. In his editor’s note, Hong Kong-born Liu tells of his connection with China (where he spent his formative years) and how despite the harshness of the realities captured in the photographs of life in China, the book “pays tribute to Chinese photographers, for their perseverance and love of their country.”



From the introduction of photography to China in the 1700’s, an interesting note of the photographic documentation of life in China revolved around the Taoist cornerstone of establishing harmony with nature, whilst western photographers’ documentation of the everyday reality of life in China was in stark reality to more placid Chinese photographers’ composition revolving around nature.



However, despite this trend, reality was not all lost. From the Great Leap Forward to the Tiananmen Square Incident to SARS to the Sichuan earthquake, the essence of situations were captured by local photographers of which some are still reluctant to show certain images, despite the passing of decades. Censorship on foreign journalists and photographers were highlighted by the 1972 “Antonioni Incident” when filmmaker Michalangelo Antonioni filmed a candid account of daily Chinese life which Maoist leaders declared as “anti-Communist” led propaganda officials to censor foreign journalists.

Even the reform policies of Deng Xiaoping weren’t as liberating for photographers as they were for journalists—many photographs still were landscape-oriented and heavily censored. The photographs released from the 1972 Nixon-Mao meeting, including the famous handshake photo between Nixon and Zhou Enlai, was said to have been censored by Mao. This censorship continues today.



Although perhaps not as obviously staged as the “happy workers” photographed, censorship and restricted internet access for journalists remained as recent as the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Opening its doors to the world to encourage business, economic growth being the priviledged host for the widely hyped summer Olympics, China seems to be preparing itself for its forecasted position in the next generation of national superpowers.

There is a dire need to reconcile the propagated past with the future’s promise. As Lui has carefully shown, when we look at China through the lens of retrospect, 60 years of Chinese history reminds us how far China has come. With a population that is 1.3 billion people-strong and a hope for a prosperous and a more liberated future, a huge new group of photographers is being groomed to allow us a glimpse into the new life and modernization in China, a land not so far far away.


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