EAST GOES WEST.

China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic 

essay by Rae Yang

New York: Aperture

204 pp./$50.O0 (hb)

China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic Asia Society 

New York City, New York

October 7, 1999-January 2, 2000

Royal Ontario Museum 

Ottawa, Ontario

January 15-March 26, 2000

University of California at Berkeley Art Museum

Berkeley, California 

April 2-June 18, 2000

Minneapolis Institute of Arts 

Minneapolis, Minnesota 

December 10, 2000-March 4, 2001

Lowe Art Museum

University of Miami 

September 18-November 17, 2002

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery 

Washington, D.C.

February 22-May 16, 2004

China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic depicts a period of change that was as monumental as any country has ever experienced in so brief a time span. In the only essay in the book, "The Birth of a New China," Rae Yang writes with insight and passion about this period, relating the personal experiences of her family and herself to larger shifts in Chinese society. She skillfully evokes the political enthusiasm of the early 1 1950s, the later loss of faith in some of Mao's policies, the miseries of the Cultural Revolution, the changes in China's economy and society after Mao's death and the challenges that China currently confronts. The photographs that accompany Yang's essay provide a visual counterpoint for some of the trends that Yang explores. Owen Lattimore's portrait Mao and his associates (n.d.), for example, shows young, assured, smiling revolutionaries caught up in the moment of their emergence. Robert Capa photographs a group of young Chinese female cadets in full military dress, standing ere ct, their hands firmly on their hips. Their faces are upturned with closed eyes, as if they are absorbing power from the sky. These women, the photograph suggests, are able and willing to fight the good fight and defend the homeland. Jack Birns's 1949 photograph Trial of Revolutionary Committeemen shows several bound captives, shot through a chain link fence, being led by helmeted police down a street in Shanghai. In an uncredited 1967 photograph, Chinese soldiers attack an effigy of Uncle Sam, while in Li Zheng Sheng's 1968 photograph, made in Manchuria, thousands of Chinese hold likenesses of Mao. In both images there is a staged quality, unlike the more spontaneous photographs of the early days of the People's Republic. There are also photographs of ordinary Chinese, mostly by anonymous photographers, who seem to be enjoying their lives in spite of the endless proclamations about revolutionary new social programs. Yang's essay, along with the illustrative pictures, is an effective and nuanced overview of C hina during the late twentieth century. The essay focuses primarily on the Chinese people, rather than Chinese institutions, which is also the case for most of the photographs in the book.

The bulk of China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic consists of 20 photographic portfolios, all of which date from the early 1970s through the late 1990s. Street photography is the dominant style, which is especially apt in a country like China, where so much of peoples' lives are spent out of doors. Liu Heung Shing's photographs show the westernization of many urban Chinese in Beijing: young Chinese tourists in western dress taking snapshots of one another; three young Chinese men staring stonily into the camera through reflective sunglasses; four Chinese women in a beauty salon receiving permanents, their heads engulfed in elaborate wires. American photographer Reagan Louie also extracts gold from the streets; in his untitled 1987 photograph, a middle-aged Chinese man stands beside a bush of pink blossoms, holding a cage of birds in one hand and the butt of a cigarette in the other. He looks into the camera as he exhales, the smoke wafting out of his mouth toward the finches.

Brazilian-born photographer Sebastiao Salgado works the streets of Shanghai, capturing people in the midst of everyday occurrences that may seem odd or unusual to westerners. In Zhaoen Market (1998), two men squat in a filthy street, blithely eating food and drinking beer; in Construction Workers Resting (1998), workers sleep on The rafters of a highrise building; and in Nan Shi Street Market (1998), a vendor presides over his caged ducks, destined for the kitchen pot. In an especially strong image, Street Scene in the City's Center (1998), Salgado captures a number of young, well-dressed people crossing a pedestrian overpass. An old beggar lies beside his bowl in the middle of the overpass as the others walk by without paying him notice. A realistically rendered beer billboard becomes a picture within the picture, providing one of several ironic elements in the scene. But as is often the case in Salgado's work, the ironic and even surrealistic- touches never detract from his humanistic vision. The pedestrian s are moving on, the beggar is not going anywhere. But the beggar is not a pitiable figure; rather, he is one of many, conducting business as usual.

Most of the photographs in this collection are made in the provinces rather than in the best known cities. While this may be surprising, it accurately reflects the demographics of China. Although China boasts nearly 100 cities with populations over a million, and quite a few that exceed five million, the vast majority of the Chinese people live in the countryside. There are several portfolios that focus on the western provinces, and particularly Yunnan, one of China's most ethnically diverse areas. Yunnan is a very picturesque place, with magnificent mountains and wellwatered farmlands. These are beautiful villages where women wear brilliantly colored clothes, where people carry babies, produce and everything else on their backs, and where pigs and geese wander freely in the streets. Several portraits feature beautiful faces, some with deeply lined, wizened countenances. Yunnan is a unique and appealing place, but it is hardly representative of China as a whole. The number of photographs of Yunnan and other w estern provinces may reflect in part the interests of Europeans and Americans. For many years, western visitors have discovered "Shangri-La" in Yunnan, and it rates an A+ in Lonely Planet and other guidebooks. Considering the physical and societal enormity of China, however, the number of photographs devoted to the western provinces seems disproportionate.

Two well-known American photographers, Robert Glenn Ketchum and Lois Conner, focus on landscapes. Ketchum photographs the canals of Suzhou, an ancient city west of Shanghai. Suzhou represents to some Chinese a fabled and romantic past, but in many of Ketchum's photographs the canals are surrounded by the city, which is hardly the stuff of which legends are made. One wonders how Suzhou looked before the onset of air pollution, corrugated metal roofs and boxish postWar architecture. Conner photographs with a panorama camera, her landscapes echoing traditional scroll painting. Like some of the photographers of Yunnan, Conner is attracted to picturesque spots, concentrating on well known places like Guilin and the Gobi Desert. These are hard-earned images, and undeniably handsome, but they fall short of extending the language of landscape or challenging the viewer. The industrial revolution has taken a terrible toll on the magnificent scenery that Song and Ming Dynasty painters celebrated, but judging by Conner's photographs, you would never know that anything has changed. She edits out the crap, just as Ansel Adams eliminated the Frito wrappers, but they are captivating pictures as far as they go.

For me, this photograph itself is like a mirror, which reflects the faces of the Chinese. For decades, we all put on make-up and participated in one grandipse show after another. Certain roles we played voluntarily: Chairman Mao's good children, Red Guards, Rebels, Educated Youths.... At the same time, others were forced to play the roles they could not afford to play: Landlords, Rightists, Counterrevolutionaries and Capitalist-Roaders. When this happened, sometimes we forgot that there were human beings behind the make-up. Then blood was spilled on the stage. Memory was stained. Our conscience could never be washed clean.

Hiroji Kubota's color photographs stand out in this collection, capturing both the traditional and evolving elements of Chinese culture. In one untitled and undated photograph, a group of Buddhist women pray before an altar filled with joss sticks. Kubota frames them with two rows of vivid, slightly out of focus red candles, their flames moving in different directions in the gentle breeze. In another photograph, elderly people play games on concrete tables that are surrounded by gnarled tree trunks. The trees cast dancing shadows on the wall behind the players, bringing to mind the sensuous lines of classical Chinese calligraphy. This elegant photograph situates an everyday occurrence-playing cards or chess on the streets is common in many Chinese cities-within a venerable visual tradition. In another image two actors in the Beijing opera put on make-up before several mirrors. Yang writes of this photograph,

Wang Jinsong's work is no less evocative, although he employs a very different strategy. In his "Parents" series (1998) several middle-aged and older Chinese couples pose in their homes. The couples pose alongside snapshots and posters on the walls, framed calligraphy and reproductions of old paintings, cooking pots, utensils, bowls of food and various knick-knacks. Two pictures feature color TV sets, and one couple poses in front of a spinet piano, a very rare object in a Chinese household. The rooms are spotless, the couples immaculately dressed. The men and women look content, both with their comfortable surroundings and with one another. These parents live apart from their grown children, a significant change from the traditional Chinese family structure in which several generations commonly lived under one roof. Jinsong explains that,

I hope to show not only differences of taste and social status but also the ways in which government policies have marked their lives. I try not to emphasize that point but those [in China] who see the world understand the meaning of these surface details.

Those in China might indeed understand these details, but what about the rest of us? Instead of providing us with informative captions, the editors of this volume (who go unnamed, as do the curators of the exhibition) give us poetic snippets that are too often liltingly irrelevant. Like so many photography books, the photographs are forced to stand on their own, and while uninitiated viewers can appreciate the images on some levels, we are needlessly impoverished. For example, in one of Jinsong's images, "Parents" series, No. 11 (1998), a well-dressed couple stands in front of shelves laden with toys, books and other objects. A small red poster proclaims in Chinese that "the god of riches has arrived," which would go completely unnoticed by anyone who did not know Mandarin. The poster obviously contributes significantly to the meaning of the picture, but a non-Chinese speaking viewer has no access to this important information.

A more historically charged example is an untitled street photograph by Sam Tata, taken in the summer of 1949 in Shanghai. Two Chinese soldiers point their rifles toward a third soldier who is dressed as a caricature of an American. He wears a necktie and a tophat of stars and stripes bearing a Chinese inscription. In one hand he holds a large book, the cover displaying three Chinese characters and the letters "U.S.A." In the other hand he holds a pistol. A non-Chinese viewer quickly picks up the anti-American sentiment of the photograph, but not much else. A Chinese viewer, on the other hand, knows that the inscription on the hat reads "war criminal," and that the book he holds represents the United States policy toward the war between the Nationalists and the Communists. In addition, Chinese viewers would know that during the summer of 1949 the war still raged between Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communists, and that it was not until the fall of that year that the Nationalists fled to Taiwan. In short, the imag e is a strong statement, from the Communist point of view, about America's misplaced and failed efforts to support the Nationalists. None of this essential information is provided for the nonMandarin speaking viewer.1

Throughout the book, captions are minimal arid the photographers' introductory statements (when they are present) are for the most part perfunctory. In a book that purports to represent the history of the last 50 years of the world's most populous country, it is deeply regrettable, if not irresponsible, to deny the viewers the tools to understand these photographs with clarity and insight.

For the most part, the portrait of China that emerges in China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic is a positive one. In the photographs, the countryside is vast and glorious, and the people seem, for the most part, content. Religion plays a role in several of the portfolios, which reflects the resurgence of Buddhism and other religions in what was, only 20 years ago, an avowedly atheistic country. A few portfolios touch on some of the grittier realities of China. Antonin Kratochvil's five photographs (the shortest portfolio in the book) depict alienated, desperate looking people amid bleak backgrounds. Zhang Hai-er's somewhat melodramatic photographs feature prostitutes, who were nonexistent in the Maoist period, but who are now highly visible in China. There are also major omissions and elisions. There are no images of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, although there were no shortage of photographers on hand. The extreme poverty of the vast majority of Chinese people is photographed only o ccasionally, and often in picturesque terms. The incredible pollution that covers much of China is barely visible. While the beauty of China and its people is amply represented in this book, we have to turn to Yang's essay to learn of many of the negative passages in recent Chinese history.

Of the 20 portfolios included in China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic, eight of the photographers have their roots in China. But the book as a whole has a distinctly western slant. For one thing, the audience for the book is primarily North American, as seen by the fact that the venues for the traveling exhibition are all in the U.S. and Canada, with the exception of Hong Kong, which was added after the book was produced. Several of the Chinese photographers included in this book were educated abroad or do not presently live in China. From an aesthetiq point of view, virtually all of the Chinese-made photographs in this book are aligned with the work of Magnum photographers. In many of the pictures, the influences of Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith are especially evident.

There are many explanations for the westernization of Asian photography, or, put a different way, for the low numbers of Chinese photographers, past and present. A full analysis of this issue lies beyond the range of this review. But one obvious answer is that the same kinds of restrictions of freedom of speech and expression that have defined much Chinese life in the last 50 years have also applied to photographers. The Chinese government still exerts tight control over print and visual media, but is fighting a losing battle in an age of satellite transmissions and growing Internet access throughout the country. Hopefully, in the next 50 years more Chinese photographers will develop ways of seeing that are consistent with their own traditions, objectives and priorities.

DAVID L. JACOBS is Professor of Art at the University of Houston.

NOTES

(1.) I am indebted to my son, Benjamin, for his translation of the Chinese in this picture and others in this essay, and for the insights he brings to so much in Chinese culture.