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Since all media are controlled by the
ruling Communist Party, Li had a
licence to click. He took pictures of
young Red Guards, screaming their
devotion to Mao and waving his Little
Red Book. Another image shows a line
of semi-naked men in bathing caps
reciting from the book before preparing
to swim in imitation of Mao himself.
Such images were a welcome record for
propaganda cadres swept up in the
revolution.
The Cultural Revolution is now vir-
tually a taboo subject in China, and is
routinely whitewashed. Yet Li made it
his mission to bring to light his photo-
graphs, many of which could never be
published lest they harm the image of
the party. “We must try, through seri-
ous reflection, through contemplation,
to relieve those whose souls were tor-
tured,” he wrote in Red-Color News Sol-dier, a book of his black-and-white pho-
tographs published in the US in 2003.
He took tens of thousands of photo-
graphs with his square-format Rollei-
flex camera. Some were published at
the time, but about 30,000 others,
which he knew were sensitive, he con-
cealed under a floorboard in his tiny
flat. There they remained, escaping the
Red Guards who ransacked his home
when he and his wife fell victim them-
selves to the Cultural Revolution in
1968 and were sent away for manual
labour. He returned two years later to
resume his job and found the negatives
where he had hidden them, still careful-
ly wrapped in oiled paper and each with
a meticulous caption.
Li was born in 1940 into a poor family
in the northeastern port city of Dalian
where his father, Li Yuanjian, was a
ship’s cook. His mother, Chen Shilan,died when he was three and his elder
brother was killed in 1949 fighting in
Mao’s Red Army. Li’s father often took
him to see films and he fell in love withcinema. His first break came through
his stamp collecting when he met a man
at a street market who offered to swap
200 of his stamps for a small Japanese
camera — a rare possession. Film was
costly, so Li’s classmates clubbed to-
gether to buy him rolls on condition
that he took photos for them with 15 of
the 16 frames.
He got into Changchun Film School
in Jilin province but his future changed
when students were forced to convert
to photojournalism after Mao’s
disastrous 1958-1960 Great Leap For-
ward. Li found a job with the Heilongji-
ang Daily in 1966, just as Mao launched
his Cultural Revolution. When Li
donned a red armband with the words
“Red-Color News Soldier” he gained
astonishing access to people and places.
In one series of pictures he recorded the
downfall of Li Fanwu, the powerful pro-
vincial governor, who was forced to
stand on a chair with a placard reading
“black gang element” hanging from his
neck while Red Guards accused him of
incest and political ambition. They
then hacked off his hair because the
style resembled Mao’s.
It was at the newspaper that Li met
Zu Yingxia, an editor. They married in- Colleagues jokingly hung plac-
ards around their necks reading “taking
the socialist road”. The couple had a
son, Xiaohan, and a daughter, Xiaobing.
He left the newspaper in the 1980s
when he found favour with the photo-
grapher son of China’s most powerful
general and was appointed a university
professor in Beijing. His pictures won
top prize at an official exhibition in
1988, the only time they have been
shown in China, and were spotted by
the American Robert Pledge of Contact
Press Images, who gathered them into
a book. It took a decade until the work
began in earnest when Li moved to
New York, spiriting thousands of his
negatives out with him.
The Chinese writer Fang Fang said: “If
not for his documentary work, people
today would not know about many
scenes that took place in those years.”
Li Zhensheng, photojournalist, was born
on September 22, 1940. His death, of a
cerebral haemorrhage, aged 79, was
announced on June 22, 2020with an increased majority of 5,236,
Best became more outspoken, oppos-
ing foundation hospitals, student top-
up fees and the war in Iraq.
Leeds North West includes not only
leafy suburbs and pleasant market
towns such as Otley, where in 2004
Best was instrumental in securing the
new Wharfedale Hospital, but also
inner-city areas such as Headingley,
where university halls abut smart
houses that have largely been convert-Her arms tied tightly across her back
with rope, the middle-aged woman in
the photograph closes her eyes in pain
as a police officer grabs her chin and
dislocates her jaw to silence any final
plea for mercy. In the second in the se-
ries, she kneels in the snow, her eyes
cast down in a look of resignation as the
crowd of men behind her stare with
open-mouthed curiosity at her last
minutes. In a final shot she kneels, a sol-
itary and desolate figure on the wintry
day in northern China, her back to the
photographer when an officer hands a
single bullet to her executioner.
The man behind the camera was
Li Zhensheng, a government photo-
grapher. His job was to record the 1980
execution of Wang Shouxin, shot in the
back of the head for embezzlement,
after she had amassed power and riches
in the pandemonium and persecution
of Chairman Mao’s 1966-1976 Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Another searing image was the group
execution of seven men and a woman
in 1968, when the purges of Mao’s ultra-
left-wing Cultural Revolution were at
their height. Two were technicians at
the Harbin electric meter factory who
had published a flyer titled “Looking
North”, which the authorities interpret-
ed as support for China’s northern
neighbour and ideological enemy, the
Soviet Union. The pair were con-
demned as counter-revolutionaries.
One, Wu Bingyuan, looked to the sky
after the sentence was pronounced, and
murmured: “The world is too dark.” Li’s
job was to photograph the group as they
were lined up on their knees in a ceme-
tery and shot by firing squad. “No one
asked me to take close-ups, but that’s
what I did, and because I had only a
35mm wide-angle lens, I had to get very
close.” The bodies lie crumpled and
bloodied in his final close-up.
As a staff photographer for the Hei-
longjiang Daily provincial newspaper in
China’s northernmost province, Li was
tasked with making an official record.
He hid 30,000 sensitive
photos under the
floorboards in his flat
Harold Best
Labour MP who took on noisy students, campaigned against littering and had Leeds North West ‘flowing through his veins’
The 1997 general election not only
brought New Labour to power with a
landslide, it also provided some unex-
pected wins for several old Labour
types including Harold Best, a former
electrician, who was soon identified
by the whips as a member of the
“awkward squad”.
“Would middle-class Leeds North
West have been entrusted to Best, a
59-year-old left-wing electrician and
former county councillor, if it had been
seriously thought winnable? Yet he
ousted Heseltine loyalist Keith Ham-
pson by a majority of 3,844,” wrote An-
drew Roth in The Guardian five
days later. Indeed, it was the first time
since it was created in 1950 that the
constituency had turned red, with Best
securing a swing of 12 per cent from
the Tories.
Best, a man of conscience and princi-
ple, did not disappoint. Within seven
months he had registered his first dis-
sent, rebelling against cuts to benefits
for lone parents. He remained largely
loyal to Tony Blair during his first term,
but was unhappy with “fudges” on
issues such as market forces in the
NHS. After retaining his seat in 2001
ed into student flats. Best undoubtedly
picked up votes from the students, who
comprised about 20 per cent of his con-
stituents. He also campaigned against
the “devastating and unregulated
spread of landlords” in the area, re-
marking once that Headingley had
three industries: education, alcohol and
landlordism.
Nationally he tackled the issue by
convening a conference of ministers,
civic leaders and MPs representing
similar areas in Birmingham and Edin-
burgh. Closer to home he was out every
morning picking up discarded chip
trays and burger buns from the pave-
ments and flowerbeds. Even his own
home was affected, with students kick-
ing a football against a party wall until
2am for two years until he managed to
have them evicted.
On one occasion Best invited Lord
Falconer, the housing minister, to see
the problems for himself, presenting
him with an eight-page action plan.
However, he was dismayed that the Uni-
versity of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan
University (now Leeds Beckett Univers-
ity) “didn’t give a fig” about his com-
plaints, adding: “After I was elected I or-ganised conferences to air the issue, but
it was like pissing in the wind.”
Harold Best was born into an Anglo-
Irish Catholic family in Leeds in 1937,
the son of Fred Best and his wife, Marie
(née Hogg), and was educated at Mean-
wood County School. After an appren-
ticeship at Leeds College of Technology
he qualified in 1958 as an electrician,
going on to work for the Co-op and later
the local education authority. He was an
official with the Electrical, Electronic,
Telecommunications and Plumbing
Union (now part of Unite), became
active in Amnesty International and
served on West Yorkshire county
council until its abolition in 1986.
In 1960 he married Glyn Douglas,
who survives him with their children:
Deborah, who works for Arts Council
England; Tricia, who works in housing;
Andrew, who is in IT; and Peter, who
runs a children’s nursery in Leeds.
In the lead-up to his 2001 re-election
Best was joined on doorsteps by Tony
Benn and Mo Mowlam. However, he
declared his intention to retire at the
next election, a decision that he came to
regret. “If I’d had the strength in the last
few years in the House that I’ve gotnow, I might have stayed,” he said in
2007 when standing unsuccessfully for
a seat on Otley town council. In retire-
ment he was a humanist celebrant.
The Labour candidate for Leeds
North West in 2005 was Judith Blake,
who is now leader of the city council.
She lost to Greg Mulholland of the Lib-
eral Democrats. Alex Sobel regained
the seat for Labour in 2017. Paying trib-
ute to his party predecessor, Sobel said:
“Harold had Leeds North West flowing
through his veins.”
Best’s protests against the encroach-
ment of student housing returned to
haunt him in 2002 when, with his
family growing older, he put their five-
bedroom house on the market. Unbe-
known to him, the estate agent adver-
tised it as “appealing to investors” and
“offering the potential to convert to a
sizeable seven-let property”. In the end
it was sold to a family.Harold Best, Labour MP, was born on
December 18, 1937. He died after a long
illness on August 24, 2020, aged 82Best called for action on “landlordism”
BBC NEWS & CURRENT AFFAIRS VIA GETTY IMAGESLi Zhensheng captured the public humiliation of Li Fanwu, whose hair was cut off; below, with his Rolleiflex camera in 1967
Li Zhensheng
Chinese photojournalist whose most searing images of the Cultural Revolution were finally published in the West decades later
LI ZHENSHENG/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES/EYEVINE