Red-Color News Soldier

What led Li Zhengsheng, a Chinese newspaper photographer, to preserve vivid images of the Cultural Revolution, even at enormous personal risk?

China’s Cultural Revolution, which ran from 1966-70 and continued to reverberate around the country until Mao’s death six years later, is an episode as opaque to Westerners as any in recent history. At the time ‘China watchers’, perched in Hong Kong and armed with little more than binoculars, tried to gain a sense of what was going on in the country. Since then, memoirs of this turbulent period, such as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, have achieved a worldwide readership. But we still know little about what the Cultural Revolution looked like.

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