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Post tags: climate change, photography, Tibet culture, Tibet development, Tibet environment
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Most people the couple met along the way were warm and welcoming — and surprisingly spontaneous. But Ms. Fischer and Mr. Braschler did run into trouble, logging three arrests during their journey. In a place like China — here follows a travel tip from the experienced — it is best to be discreet when using a 4-by-5 camera equipped with a flash and a soft box to make a portrait of a trash collector.

“People loved it at the beginning,” Ms. Fischer said. “You have to imagine — dozens of people surrounding us while we shoot.”

But when they tried to make a portrait of a truck mechanic in Xinmin, Liaoning Province, bystanders agreed that the man was too dirty; he would give an international audience a negative impression of the country.

[…] Yet they were overwhelmed by the beauty — and the range — of the physical landscape, mountains and all. “It was just so much to digest,” Ms. Fischer said.

Twenty of the pair’s images are included in a slideshow at Lens.

In an op-ed accompanying some of her own photographs, Sim Chi Yin also described the challenges of engaging with her subjects, the rich and poor on opposite sides of China’s yawning wealth gap.

With the “rats” and “ants,” the trash collectors, cobblers and couriers, it took time to build rapport and trust. But it was even harder to get wealthy Chinese — perhaps like rich people everywhere — to open up. Most live in gated, guarded communities on the outskirts of the city, and socialize behind closed doors. A few months ago, I was granted rare permission to photograph inside an exclusive club in Beijing for high rollers, and only at a party where some members were in costume.

The migrant workers and the poor mostly accept that life is unfair, at least for now.

“There is no difference between me and the people who live in the posh condominium above,” Zhuang Qiuli, 27, a “rat tribe” pedicurist who lived in a basement apartment, told me in Beijing. “We wear the same clothes and have the same hairstyles. The only difference is we cannot see the sun. In a few years, when I have money, I will also live upstairs.”

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“Many children meet their parents once a year or even years, therefore some of them have both physical and psychological problems,” says the photographer.

Liu, who spent the summer at NYU as a 2012 Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow, was raised in a rural village in Shan Dong Province and is currently based in Beijing, having personally migrated to a city along with his family years prior. Beijing Railway Station, which serves as a gateway for millions of migrants to the capital, is in close proximity to his apartment, giving the photographer a unique view of the daily flood of fresh-faced migrants entering the city.

[…] After photographing family members left behind in the countryside, the photographer returned to Beijing and photographed rural migrants in their workspace. In a conceptual twist, Liu reunites family members photographically. Parents, at a construction site or sausage factory, stand beside towering portraits of their children back home, creating a visual contrast—a collision of rural and urban—and a bridging of that chasm of familial separation within a single frame.

Deborah Jian Lee and Sushma Subramanian reported on the socially corrosive effects of Chinese labor migration at Foreign Policy last year, describing its emotional toll on the country’s estimated 58 million “left behind” children. But another set of images at People’s Daily Online (via Adam Minter) presents the other side of the story, combining photographs of migrant workers with graphs of their often steeply climbing incomes.

See also Huang Qingjun’s photo series Belongings, which views China’s economic changes from a different angle, via CDT.

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Post tags: migrant labor, migrant workers, photographers, photography, rural areas, rural children
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A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village’s 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.

[…] Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.

[…] The death toll is staggering. “The most officials have admitted is 20 million,” he says, but he puts the total at 36 million. It is “equivalent to 450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki … and greater than the number of people killed in the first world war,” he writes. Many think even this is a conservative figure: in his acclaimed book Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikotter estimates that the toll reached at least 45 million.

At Foreign Policy, Dikötter describes the almost total absence from available archives of any photographic record of the famine:

I read through thousands of documents: secret reports from the Public Security Bureaus, detailed minutes of top party meetings, investigations into cases of mass murder, inquiries compiled by special teams tasked with determining the extent of the catastrophe, secret opinion surveys, and letters of complaint written by ordinary citizens. Some were neatly written in longhand, others typed out on flimsy, yellowing paper. Some were excruciating to read, for instance, a report written by an investigation team noting the case of a boy in a Hunan village who had been caught stealing a handful of grain. A local Communist Party cadre forced his father to bury the boy alive. The father died of grief a few days later.

[…] For four years, I studied Mao’s famine, and only once have I seen a visual illustration of its awfulness. In 2009, I visited a historian in a drab concrete building in the suburbs of Beijing. He, too, had been working on the history of the Great Leap Forward, burrowing in archives for more than a decade and obsessively documenting the starvation that had decimated the region of his birth, a county barely 100 miles north of Mao’s hometown in Hunan. Stacks of photocopied archival material bulged out of filing cabinets in his sparse office. I asked him whether he had ever seen a photograph of the famine. He frowned and reluctantly pulled out a folder with a reproduction of the only picture he had discovered. It came from the files of the party committee in his home county and was from a police investigation into a case of cannibalism. The small, fading picture showed a young man standing against a brick wall, peering straight into the camera, seemingly emotionless. By his feet stood a large pot containing the parts of a young boy, his head and limbs severed from his body.

Another visual record of the period has survived, however. A slideshow of Great Leap Forward-era propaganda posters at Foreign Policy shows smiling farmers and bumper harvests. These images helped preserve the illusion that Yang Jisheng himself laboured under for many years: that starvation was local, and deaths were isolated tragedies, rather than part of a wider catastrophe of the government’s making.

Foreign Policy also hosts an article, translated by Martin Merz, in which Murong Xuecun angrily discusses present day arguments over the causes, extent and reality of the famine, and the government’s continued efforts to control the narrative. He writes scathingly about Chinese youth’s supposedly unquestioning acceptance of official information, and blames the Party’s stifling influence for this, the polarised recent debate over the famine, and other evils (“in which case he’s in for a nasty shock if he ever leaves China“, as Jamie K commented at Blood and Treasure).

For some 40 years, official publications in China have called the Great Famine of 1959-1962 “the three years of natural disasters.” But no one seems to know exactly what these disasters were: Floods? Drought? Earthquakes? Landslides? Hail storms or locust plagues? No one has the answer, and no one is brave enough to stand up and demand an answer from the government — because the official pronouncement of “natural disaster” is sufficiently intimidating to close all mouths.

Motivated by the desire to be “responsible to history and the truth,” a phrase churned out ad nauseam in China’s mass media, official accounts over the last 10 years have become more circumspect, employing the more neutral term “the three years of difficulties,” which seems to cover both the natural and manmade. This approach obviates the need to examine contributing factors and that Mao and other leaders caused the famine.

[…] The memories of those who experienced the famine are fading away. The current generation, like their parents, were force-fed state CCTV newscasts and party mouthpiece People’s Daily reports, but also fattened to the point of obesity with Coca-Cola and hamburgers. Of course they now find it difficult to imagine that people once starved to death. And so they ask: If they didn’t have rice, why didn’t they eat meat?

While stories of the disaster may seem far-fetched to the young, older generations’ memories of the famine might actually be fuelling China’s ballooning childhood obesity problem. From Debra Bruno at The Washington Post:

Although the era of famine is long past, many grandparents and parents still push their children to eat a lot.

Setsuko Hosoda, a family doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital, says the parents and grandparents she sees are “always worried that their child is not eating enough.” A 2012 Penn State study of 176 Chinese children ages 6 to 18 found that 72 percent of mothers of overweight children thought their children were normal or underweight.

Sissi Zhong, a 26-year-old Beijing secretary, recalls that her grandparents got angry if she left food on her plate when she was a child. “They said, ‘Do you know, in my time of food shortages, people didn’t have food, so how can you waste your food?’ ” Zhong says. So she cleaned her plate even if she was very full.

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Post tags: censorship, famine, great leap forward, historical record, history, Murong Xuecun, obesity, photography, propaganda posters, Yang Jisheng
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Typical #Tool used by #China #Propaganda in order to #Manipulate People #Beautiful #Photos twitpic.com/aj1egy #Tibet #ChinaIllusions

— snowlions (@snowlions) December 8, 2012

At The New York Times’ Lens blog, James Estrin showcases the work of Dutch photographer Marieke ten Wolde, who has aimed to capture a more balanced view of a changing Tibet.

Like many photographers who visit Tibet, Marieke ten Wolde has thousands of photographs of beautiful mountains, picturesque villages and nomads in colorful costume. But as she immersed herself in Tibetan life, she began to shift her attention from the icons of an ancient culture to the effects of China’s rule.

“I still take those photos because some places are just so beautiful, it’s a pity not to do it,” she said. “But it’s not the most interesting part, I think.”

[…] On her last visit, Ms. ten Wolde saw a great deal of tension in the streets of Tibet’s rapidly expanding cities and said that people were vocal with their concerns about the dams, the mines and the language, which is being replaced by Mandarin in classrooms, government offices and other institutions.

“It’s gotten worse year by year since 2008, when there was a lot more freedom,” she said. “Now we can’t even go, so we don’t know how bad it is.”

Click through for a slideshow of ten Wolde’s photographs.

Images by National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita, on display at China Real Time Report, lean more towards the traditionally scenic. But this, too, is a reaction to the ferocious pace of change. In his new book ‘Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa’, Yamashita has tried to capture these sights before they are lost: “I do believe that the future is going to look a lot different than this book. It’s the last look at a Tibet that still looks like Tibet.”

See also Yamashita’s documentation of China’s high-speed rail programme, via CDT, and CDT’s latest coverage of the wave of Tibetan self-immolations which has now claimed nearly a hundred lives.

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Post tags: development, landscape, photographers, photography, photos, Tibet, Tibet culture, Tibet development
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Title: “¥”

This photo is named for the symbol for China’s currency, the yuan. When he first won the Nobel, Mo Yan joked that the prize money wouldn’t even be enough to buy a house in Beijing. Netizens found the “magical realism” of his situation too rich.

Title: “A Man Who Loves to Talk”

Guan Moye chose the pen name “Don’t Speak” (Mo Yan 莫言) from an admonition his father gave him during his Cultural Revolution childhood. Mo’s politics have stirred controversy even before he won the Nobel. He is the vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Association, a Communist Party organization. Often silent on the fate of fellow Chinese writers in exile or under arrest, he in fact voiced his hope for fellow Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo’s release from prison days after winning his prize. But in Stockholm last week, Mo would not directly answer questions about Liu, who won the 2010 Peace prize one year into an 11-year prison sentence. “I have already issued my opinion about this matter,” he told reporters.

In 2009, Wang told the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Photography is one way to reach the unseen through the seeable.” In the tightly-watched space of the Chinese Internet, Wang says more about Mo’s journey in pictures than he could in words.

Via CDT Chinese.

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Many factories didn’t respond well to the unusual request from a foreign photographer. Mr. Schifres’s assistant would explain that the project was about daily life, sometimes invoking pride to persuade the factory owners to say yes.

But when they interviewed the workers, the photographer and his team found that the pride was really there.

“The answer was always, ‘Oh, we’re very proud; we’re happy that the products go all around the world,’ ” Mr. Schifres said. “‘This is good for China; this is good for our generation.’”

“They have absolutely no idea about controversies around the world about the Made in China products,” he added.

Click through for a slideshow of Schifres’ work, and see also Leslie Chang’s recent TED talk, ‘Meet China’s Factory Workers‘, via CDT.

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Huang’s project has taken him to 14 of China’s 33 provinces, giving him an unusually broad perspective of how the country is changing. He is optimistic about the process, and where it will lead.

“In lots of Chinese villages, the government has delivered roads and connected them with electricity. This has been a huge change. If you’ve a road, you can move about. If you’ve got electricity you can have TV, you get the news and ideas about what the outside world is thinking.

“The biggest problems in rural areas now are how people can get better education for their children, and healthcare,” he says.

Many photos appear to capture something that is about to be lost. Families camp as if about to move on. They are framed by houses that have just been expensively renovated or are about to be pulled down. The preponderance of cooking utensils, the paucity of clothes and items of leisure suggest a lifestyle that is about to be upended.

See also a previous CDT post on Huang’s work. His exhibit brings to mind a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009, in which Chinese artist Song Dong displayed the complete contents of his mother’s home, amassed over 50 years.

In a similar effort to document a disappearing lifestyle, journalist and photographer Howard French has published a book together with writer Qiu Xiaolong of photographs, essays and poems titled, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life. As Ian Johnson writes on the New York Review of Books blog:

We get no clichéd pictures of a beggar in front of a Louis Vuitton mural, no workers looking uncomprehendingly at a Bentley pulling into a five-star whatever. Instead we are thrust deeply into ordinary people’s lives, into their tiny living rooms with moldy walls and faded curtains. We see them living out on streets of cracked sidewalks and crumbling facades. We watch them sitting and waiting in poses of leisure. The transience and decay tells us that all this is vanishing.

See more of French’s photographs on his website.

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Post tags: Howard French, lifestyle, photographers, photography, poverty, quality of life, rural development, Shanghai
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In August 1966, I saw the Red Guards attack the St. Nicholas Church and Jile Temple Buddhist temple in Heilongjiang. They were burning sculptures and holy scriptures. There was fierce criticism of leaders, criticism of the monks. I started to have doubts. When I started to waver, I started to take more pictures documenting different sides of what was happening. All of us photojournalists had a saying at the time: we take two types of pictures: “useful” and “not useful” pictures. “Useful” means they could be used by newspaper. “Not useful” means they could not be used by newspaper.

By this judgment, half of the pictures in my book (“Red-Color News Soldier”) or more than that, were not useful. Those of people cheering and studying Mao’s sayings were positive. And then there are those seen as “negative.” I knew they couldn’t be published; I didn’t know when and how they’d be useful but I had a feeling they’d be useful somehow.

[…] Many people, when they saw that my Cultural Revolution pictures won big prizes, they said, “But Teacher Li, we didn’t live in Cultural Revolution, so we can’t take such great pictures.” I remember feeling the same when our teacher showed pictures he’d shot in Yan’an [the Chinese Communist revolutionary base in the 1930s and 1940s].

But this is a naïve way of looking at things. It’s not reality that creates heroes, but heroes create reality. I’m not saying I’m a hero; I always tell my students to shoot what’s around them. No need to track down disasters and wars, but just shoot what’s around them, just pick up your camera today and shoot.

Li also laments that he did not record enough of people’s everyday lives during this tumultuous period. As if heeding his advice, another Heilongjiang photographer Huang Qingjun has spent almost ten years creating portraits of Chinese people with all their belongings arrayed in front of their homes. The collections of seemingly mundane objects offer some insight into what China’s economic growth has meant for each household.

“I wanted to show ordinary people. Show them in their environment and at home, the connection,” says Mr. Huang, a tall 40-year-old from Heilongjiang Province on the border with Russia. “Because China is a place that is changing.”

The link between people and their possessions is apt, because above all, China is getting richer — though that’s perhaps not the first thing a viewer sees in the photographs, which focus on ordinary people who don’t seem to own much.

[…] Next year, the 10th anniversary of the start of his project, Mr. Huang wants to revisit families to see how things have changed.

“With annual economic growth over 8 percent, I guess a lot has changed,” he said.

Both articles include slideshows of the photographers’ work. Li’s can currently be seen at the Barbican in London, and Huang’s at the Southern Barbarian restaurant and café in Beijing. See also the work of Liu Jie, whose portraits of rural families divided by labour migration show China’s economic rise from another angle.

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Post tags: Cultural Revolution, economic growth, Heilongjiang, history, Mao era, Mao Zedong, photographers, photography, yanan
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Old photograph fever is currently sweeping China. A new and intense appetite for images of the country’s past has resulted in a publishing phenomenon – sales of books of historical photographs have rocketed.

Such photographs are exceptionally rare in China. The turbulent history of the 20th Century meant that many archives were destroyed by war, invasion and revolution. Mao Zedong’s government regarded the past as a “black” time, to be erased in favour of the New China. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s finished the job.

[...]But now China is opening its horizons, looking to the West and to the past, to reclaim its cosmopolitan history.

After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Chinese leaders concluded that young people did not fully appreciate what the Communist Party had done for China, so they began an ambitious new policy of historical education, the Patriotic Education Movement. The craze for old photographs is partly a by-product of this movement.

But such photographs are not to be found in China. They are in the attics and wardrobes of foreigners – many British – whose families once lived and worked in China and who took their photographs safely out of the country when they left.

Click through to read the entire article, and see a slideshow with commentary.

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Post tags: foreigners in China, history, photography
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China, the most populous country and the second-largest economy in the world, is a vast, dynamic nation that continues to grow and evolve in the 21st century. In this, the latest entry in a semi-regular series on China, we find images of tremendous variety, including astronauts, nomadic herders, replica European villages, pole dancers, RV enthusiasts, traditional farmers, and inventors. This collection is only a small view of the people and places in China over the past several weeks

The subjects of the 47 pictures included visually supplement much recent CDT coverage of China: Liu Ying – China’s first female astronaut; Wang Jinxiang – mother of activist Chen Guangcheng, caught in the fallout of his recent escape; a Uyghur man in the ruins of his recently demolished house; victims of China’s increasingly endemic obesity problem; a scene from inside China’s clone of an Austrian world heritage site; a young Tibetan monk mourning a protester who died in self-immolation; a Hong Kong street brimming with protest after Li Wangyang’s suspicious suicide; and much more.

For more photo-documentation of a changing China, also see In Focus’s previous China slideshows: Tiananmen Square, Then and Now; A Look Inside China; Rising Protests in China; or 21st Century China.

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Post tags: journalism, modern life, photography
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On Jan. 23, Beijing will begin releasing hourly readings of air particulate measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less, in an attempt to come clean about the level of pollution that regularly blankets the capital. Pollution is a sensitive subject in China, with state-run media often explaining away the smell of glue and haze so thick it obscures even nearby buildings with the term “fog,” and claiming, unbelievably, that Beijing enjoyed 274 “blue sky days” in 2011. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has shied away from releasing its annual pollution statistics, but it runs a popular Twitter feed measuring the air on an hourly basis.

Environmental photographer Sean Gallagher took all of these photos today, a day the U.S. Embassy’s feed called “hazardous,” which means, among other things, that they recommend children and older adults remain indoors. While the color blue does occasionally feature in the skies above the capital, days like this recur with depressing frequency.

See also Gallagher’s website, the US Embassy’s @BeijingAir twitter feed and Greenpeace’s list of resources for tracking air quality in cities around China and beyond.

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A sepia-tone image of a street in Opium War-era Peking looks dusty and motionless like an Old West boomtown after a shootout. Guangzhou, not yet a global center for manufacturing, still appears courtly. Seeing one of the images in the Getty Center’s “Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China,” you have no doubt that life was more mundane for the people in the frame, but at the same time it’s hard to believe we would have anything in common with them. The show, which closes May 1, draws from the Museum’s large collection of Felice Beato photographs, supplemented by numerous Chinese artists who had just gained access to cameras. Many of the images are by now unknown photographers, which, despite their clear historical value, makes them seem even less real.

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Wetlands are found on every continent on earth, as rivers, shallow lakes, swamps, mangroves, estuaries and floodplains. They are valued for their ability to store floodwaters, protect shorelines, improve water quality and recharge groundwater aquifers.

China’s wetlands cover some 650,000 square kilometres, ranking first in Asia and representing 10% of the world’s total. A quiet crisis is occurring, however, as these important waters are quickly disappearing.

As a result of China’s rapid economic growth, coupled with climate change, vast swaths of China’s wetlands have already vanished, resulting in serious consequences for the millions of people across the country who rely on these sources of water.

Gallagher’s work has highlighted the precarious situation of the Yangtze’s alligators, and the efforts to prevent them from following the river’s baiji dolphins and paddlefish into extinction. His work for the Pulitzer Center can be found at ThreatenedWaters.com.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: endangered species, photography, wetlands
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