A year in pictures: 1948
©HENRI^ CARTIER-BRESSON–MAGNUMPHOTOSChina crisis
A shopkeeper peers from his empty store at a peasant eating
his provisions in a Beijing street in December 1948, in
the fina l months of rule by Chiang K ai-shek ’s nationa list
Guomindang regime. Mao Zedong’s communist armies had
triumphed in northern China in the civil war that caused
massive disruption to the economy, widespread poverty and
hunger. The shopkeeper has nothing to sell and the peasant’s
traditional marketplace is gone; in the end, neither would
benefit from Mao Zedong’s social revolution, launched with
the founding of the People’s Republic on 21 September 1949.