B10 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESMONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020Li Zhensheng, a photographer who at
great personal risk documented the dark
side of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution,
producing powerful black-and-white im-
ages that remain a rare visual testament
to the brutality of that tumultuous period,
many of them not developed or seen for
years, has died. He was 79.
His death was confirmed on Tuesday
by Robert Pledge, a founder of Contact
Press Images and editor of Mr. Li’s photo
book “Red-Color News Soldier,” who said
that Mr. Li had been hospitalized on Long
Island. He lived in Queens. Further de-
tails, including the date of his death, were
not released.
Mr. Li was a young photographer at a
local newspaper in northeastern China
when Mao started the Revolution in May
- Wearing a red arm band that said,
“Red-Color News Soldier,” Mr. Li was giv-
en extraordinary access to official events.
“I was excited like everyone else,” he
recalled in a 2003 interview with The New
York Times. “The happiness was real. We
felt lucky to be living the moment.”
But his excitement quickly gave way to
anxiety. What began as a political cam-
paign aimed at consolidating power soon
engulfed the entire country, unleashing
decade-long turmoil that upended Chi-
nese society. Factions of radical youths
known as “Red Guards” roamed the coun-
try battling one another and perceived
“class enemies.”
Countless historical sites and relics
were destroyed in the name of stamping
out China’s “feudal” and “bourgeois” cul-
ture. Mr. Li began to have doubts after
witnessing Red Guards in the northeast-
ern province of Heilongjiang ransacking
churches and temples, burning scrip-
tures and criticizing monks.
“I realized that I had to document this
tumultuous period,” he wrote. “I didn’t re-
ally know whether I was doing it for the
sake of the revolution, for myself or for
the future, but I knew I had to use a cam-
era as a tool to document it.”
Mr. Li took not just the propaganda
photos — the raised fists, the revolution-
ary fervor, the mass assemblies — that
were required by his newspaper, but also
less flattering ones. He amassed about
100,000 photos during that period, stash-
ing many of the negatives under the par-
quet floorboards in his home in Harbin,
the capital of China’s northernmost prov-
ince, where they remained undeveloped
for years.
His collection remains one of the most
complete and nuanced visual chronicles
of how the Cultural Revolution upended
daily life far away from the capital, Bei-
jing. Among the photos are numerous
ones of “struggle sessions,” in which peo-
ple were criticized, abused and made to
stand for hours with their heads bowed
before a sea of accusers.
At times Mr. Li participated in the criti-
cisms, too, shouting slogans to get a
crowd going so that he could take photos.
During these sessions, many people were
forced to wear placards around their
necks detailing their supposed crimes:
“big property owner,” “black gang ele-
ment,” “counterrevolutionary revisionist
element.” Some were sentenced to hard
labor or death. Mr. Li documented the ex-
ecutions.
Though he had only one chance to pho-
tograph Mao, the “great helmsman” is
omnipresent, seen in portraits, busts and
badges. In one photo, people shouted
praises to Mao as they swam in the
Songhua River. In another, a newlywed
couple decorated their bedroom with pho-
tos and quotations of the chairman. Ac-
cording to the official caption, the couple
were later criticized for making love un-
der Mao’s eyes, but they defended them-
selves by saying that they had always
turned out the lights first.
By the end of the Cultural Revolution, in
1976, tens of millions of people had been
persecuted and up to 1.5 million had died
according to some estimates. Many were
driven to suicide.
“No other political movement in Chi-
na’s recent history lasted as long, was as
widespread in its impact, and as deep in
its trauma as the Cultural Revolution,”
Mr. Li said in a 2018 interview with The
Times.
In 1988, China was in the midst of a brief
period of openness when Mr. Li exhibited
20 of his previously hidden images for the
first time in Beijing. His series, “Let the
Past Speak to the Future,” won the top
prize in the competition.
In the decades since, the Cultural Revo-
lution has become an increasingly taboo
topic in China. Officials had repeatedly
blocked Mr. Li’s attempts to publish the
photos, part of a broader effort by the rul-
ing Communist Party to whitewash that
turbulent chapter.
“Li Zhensheng gave a face, an image
and a texture to the horrors of a period of
incredible importance in modern Chinese
history,” said Geremie R. Barmé, an Aus-
tralian Sinologist. “He is part of a large
body of men and women of conscience in
China who have pushed to remember and
reflect on a period of history that the au-
thorities would rather distort or silence.”
In 2003, Mr. Li published a book of his
photos called “Red-Color News Soldier.”
Since then, the photos have been exhib-
ited in more than 60 countries.
“I think we must try, through serious
reflection, through contemplation, to re-
lieve those whose souls were tortured,” he
wrote in the book. “I want to show the
world what really happened during the
Cultural Revolution.”
Li Zhensheng was born to a poor family
in the northeastern port city of Dalian on
Sept. 22, 1940. His father, Li Yuanjian, was
a former cook on a steamship. Mr. Li was
3 when his mother, Chen Shilan, died.
Not long afterward, the family moved
back to their ancestral hometown in the
eastern province of Shandong. Mr. Li
grew up with his younger sister and elder
half brother, who was killed in 1949 fight-
ing in Mao’s revolutionary army.
Mr. Li’s interest in cinema and photog-
raphy was sparked at a young age. To pay
for movie tickets, he collected and soldempty aluminum toothpaste tubes. While
in middle school, he traded a prized stamp
collection for his first camera. Friends
sometimes pooled their money to buy a
roll of film so that Mr. Li could take their
photos.
He went on to study cinematography at
the Changchun Film School in the north-
eastern province of Jilin. But because of
Mao’s disastrous economic policies dur-
ing the program called the Great Leap
Forward and the mass famine that fol-
lowed, there were few job opportunities in
the field. After graduation, Mr. Li eventu-ally found a job as a photojournalist at
The Heilongjiang Daily in Harbin.
He married Zu Yingxia, an editor at the
newspaper, in 1968. That year — two
years into the Cultural Revolution — Mr.
Li was accused of being a “new bour-
geois.” He was criticized before 300 em-
ployees of the newspaper for more than
six hours and demoted.
The next year, he and his wife were sent
to the countryside for “rectification” and
forced into manual labor. By the time they
were permitted to return to Harbin, in
1971, the height of the Cultural Revolutionhad passed. He went back at the newspa-
per, though it wasn’t until after Mao’s
death, in 1976, that he finally felt safe.
In 1982, Mr. Li began teaching photog-
raphy at a university in Beijing, where he
met Mr. Pledge, of Contact Press Images,
in 1988. They kept in touch and began
working on Mr. Li’s photo book a decade
later.
At his death, they were working on a
new book, of self-portraits that Mr. Li took
during the Cultural Revolution — a risky
act at a time when people were expected
to put party before self. Mr. Li also docu-
mented the pro-democracy protests in
Beijing that led up to the Tiananmen
Square crackdown in 1989, though he
never published the photos.
“It had been his obsession all his life —
to be a witness to history and to record it,”
Mr. Pledge said.
In his later years Mr. Li split his time
between New York and Beijing, where he
could be closer to his son, Xiaohan, and
daughter, Xiaobing. Information on his
survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Li’s lifelong wish was to make his
fellow Chinese remember the Cultural
Revolution. That mission became more
difficult in recent years as the Chinese au-
thorities reversed efforts to reckon with
modern history, resulting in what some
have called a nationwide collective amne-
sia.
Still, he took a step closer to the goal in
2018, when the Chinese University of
Hong Kong Press published the first Chi-
nese-language edition of “Red-Color
News Soldier.” Though it was distributed
mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, some
copies found their way to mainland China
through unofficial channels.
“Some people have criticized me, say-
ing I am washing the country’s dirty laun-
dry in public,” Mr. Li said in 2018. “But
Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past,
America still talks about its history of
slavery, why can’t we Chinese talk about
our own history?”Li Zhensheng, 79, Who Captured the Horror of China’s Revolution, Dies
By AMY QINA local peasant leading the crowd in chanting slogans during a “fight against the enemies” rally in China’s Heilongjiang Province on May 12, 1965.PHOTOGRAPHS BY LI ZHENSHENG/CONTACT PRESS IMAGESThree men in Harbin on Sept. 12, 1966, with placards
that listed their names and their alleged crimes (from left,
black gang element, local despot, counterrevolutionary).Li Zhensheng in a risky 1967 self portrait
during the Cultural Revolution, when people
were expected to put party before self.A young woman attacking a fellow peasant,
Zhang Diange, for “unreasonably” pressuring
her father to repay a debt on March 25, 1965.Swimmers praising Mao Zedong while floating along the Songhua River. Mao figured
into many of Mr. Li’s photographs — not in person but in portraits, busts and badges.The staff of The Heilongjiang Daily in 1966 accusing the
head of a local work group of “following the capitalist line.”Mr. Li at the Barbican Gallery in London in 2012. His collection chronicles the dark side of the Cultural Revolution.RAY TANG/SHUTTERSTOCKBella Huang contributed research.
Amassing nearly 100,000
photos at great personal
risk and hiding many of
them under floorboards.