In 1966 during the tumult of China’s Cultural Revolution, Li Zhensheng was working as a news photographer for the Heilongjiang Daily. He realised that he needed a Red Guard armband to get better access to events so he tried to join the two Red Guard units at his newspaper. When one turned him down for being too conservative and the other for not being proletarian enough, he formed his own unit with some pals.  There were only seven of them so they couldn’t be a rebel “group”; they had to be a “fighting team”.  For the next few months his fighting team and the two other groups argued endlessly about who was the most revolutionary.  In the end they decided to take it to Beijing and they sent their representatives to the Chinese Media Association in the capital to debate it out.  The Association decided in favour of Li’s group and gave them a new name – Red Colour News Soldier – with an armband and characters copied from Mao’s own calligraphy. 

That armband got him everywhere and it is the reason that we now have his archive of some 30,000 annotated negatives recording exactly what he saw. Since he believed deeply in the role of the photographer as a reporter of events he often strayed from his brief – which was to take only images giving a positive impression of events.

He took forbidden ones too – known as “beyond the assignment”.

When things hotted up photographers had to hand in all their negatives for destruction. Li was himself finally attacked in public and sent to a “school of rectification” for two years but he had hidden his negatives under the floorboards in his one room flat. Much later, when things had quietened down, he was able to smuggle these out to New York resulting in the publication early in the new century of a selection under the title Red Colour News Soldier (Phaidon, 2003).  I picked up a copy of this 300-page volume in my local secondhand bookshop for a few pounds. 

I felt a curious reluctance to read it for a few weeks, perhaps because it felt so monumental.  Then in the same bookshop I happened across a small tome entitled My Bodhi Tree by Zhang Xianliang which is the second volume of the author’s account of his life in a Labour Reform Camp during the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties and early sixties.  Now I had point and counterpoint: the ground-level view from the labour camp and the high-level reportage from the photography. 

The strange thing about both Li and Zhang is that they were not what you could call counter-revolutionaries.  At first, Li was a great enthusiast for the Cultural Revolution; and Zhang says that he took the notion of struggle and self-criticism sessions very seriously.  At that point, neither of them doubted that Mao Zedong was leading the country to a glorious future.

Anyone interested in the history of these turbulent times in China can easily read it up.  The Great Leap Forward was a disastrous attempt to modernise the Chinese economy in the late 1950s and early 1960s resulting in a famine which killed millions. The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attempt to reassert his power in the late 60s and onwards through the destruction of the Communist Party structure by young Red Guards. What interests me though, as you might imagine, is what the photographs and words show and how they record events.

The life of a photograph can be a funny thing.  Here we have images from negatives once so secret and so dangerous that had they been discovered under the floorboards of Li’s house the results for him would have been catastrophic.  Yet no more than 30 years later they emerge, blinking, into the daylight, mute yet somehow loaded.  Back then they would have been counter-revolutionary lies: now they are testaments to truth.  Yet the photograph has not changed: only the circumstances are different.  So what is the “truth” that a photograph is supposed to represent?  It seems to be little more than a mirror into which we gaze to see reflected back our own shadowy gaze.

The caption to this photograph – taken just after the death of Mao Ze Dong - is: “A woman sheds a tear in People’s Stadium during the official memorial on 18 September”  Even that expression “sheds a tear” is ambiguous.  Was she forcing a couple of drops out, or was this an unstoppable damburst on the death of her hero?  We tend to think that these are contrived performances but, real or orchestrated, are they in fact so different from the public displays of grief in the UK on the death, for example, of The Princess of Wales in 1997?

The structure of My Bodhi Tree is not dissimilar to that of the photobook.  It is a commentary on the author’s 1960 prison diary.  The diary excerpts are snapshots, the verbal equivalent of Li’s photos and the commentary fleshes out the background to the diary much as Li’s commentary fleshes out his photographs. The diaries are strictly factual and record a life of hard labour and starvation rations.  Yet the author comments that it wasn’t that unpleasant if you adapted.  At least you got some food, while on the outside a mass famine was killing some 20 million people. So even the words can’t nail it: the diary records dreadful conditions but the author says maybe it wasn’t so bad.  The idea had been to replicate the Soviet Gulag system but there weren’t the materials to build prisons like that in China; and the cadres running the Chinese camps were themselves peasants who had no experience or interest in the organisation of repression.  Yet more ambiguity.

In a foreword to Red Colour News Soldier, Jonathan D Spence, (Professor of History at Yale University) writes that most historians believe that the longer the time elapsed after a given event, the easier it will become to interpret that event.  Yet that is not true of the Cultural Revolution in China, he says.  As time has passed it has become harder and harder to make sense of it: the deliberate unleashing of the forces of chaos; the calculated setting of one section of society against another; the dizzying change of faces at the top; the endless reversals of policy.  (I won’t draw the obvious parallel.)

He goes on to say that Li’s photographs (and presumably he would include books like Zhang’s) may be able to help rectify that.  Maybe they will, which is great for professional historians. For the rest of us they seem to me to be more evidence of the slipperiness of experience.  It’s here and it is gone.  Historians may try to cram it into boxes but somehow it always seems to wriggle out again. The photographs and the diaries, the raw material, survive for us to make of them what we will.