Mick Hartley

On the subject of New York's Museum of Modern Art (below), let me air a familiar complaint.

Alongside Marina Abramovic's exhibition(ism) there was, for something completely different, a retrospective of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. One wall was devoted to photos, new to me, of Cartier-Bresson's visit to China during the Great Leap Forward in 1958. The images and the commentary provided by Cartier-Bresson himself, as you can see here, are, while not starry-eyed, at least reasonably positive about Mao's aims for China. For instance:

Work study programs are an integral part of China’s student life. In Shenyang’s engineering school, constructed in 1950, the girl at this lathe and six thousand other students study and produce for five years under eighty teachers. Lack of scientists, engineers and technicians is one of Mao Tse-tung’s toughest problems in pushing ahead on the industrialization of the land.

Or:

Fushun synthetic oil workers meet in the evening after work to discuss production figures. Their 1957 production: 400,000 tons compared to 50,000 tons in 1949 and to 250,000 in 1944, under Japanese occupation. Despite the enormous rise in crude oil production, it falls far short of the growing needs of the country. Development of shale and coal-tar oil are expected to fill the gap. On the wall is an attack on the “bourgeois rightists.”

Workers enlarging a steel mill in Wuhan finish an automated blast furnace with the aid of baskets—the centuries-old technique of Chinese coolies. The country is still short of heavy machinery for construction but takes full advantage of its greatest asset: man power. With that asset, Mao Tse-tung may be able to achieve his 1958 quota of 10,700,000 tons of steel, twice the production of 1957.

"I call this book Tombstone," the author, Yang Jisheng, writes in the opening paragraph. "It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book."

 

"Tombstone" has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world (I first learned of it recently in California, from an excited Australian historian). Based on a decade's worth of interviews and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, "Tombstone" — in two volumes and 1,100 pages — establishes beyond any doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialization — Mao's "Great Leap Forward" — was an utter disaster.

A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in recorded history. "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses," one witness told Yang. "Then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people."

It's not that I think Cartier-Bresson should now be posthumously exposed as a tool of Communism. He was there before the corpses started piling up. How was he – a photographer – to know how it would turn out, when even the brightest political thinkers in the West failed to catch on to the scale of the impending disaster? I don't expect my heroes – and Cartier-Bresson as a photographer is a kind of hero – to be perfect in every way.

It's just that I'm, well, uneasy about it – about the pretence that there's no problem at all: that you go to China, travel around under official supervision, see what you're supposed to see, report what you've been shown, and then just move on to other subjects without a glance back, despite the fact that you'd been watching, unbeknowst to you at the time, the beginnings of what was, as I say, one of the greatest man-made catastrophes in history. And you then go off to the US and be openly critical of American society.

Not there's anything wrong with that. There was, and still is, much to be critical about in American society. The thing is, though, that it's an open society. Go to the US and Americans by the score will be only too keen to explain to you what's wrong with their society. Interested in racism? So are thousands of others, who'll lead you by the hand to the best places to view racism in action, to the best articles to read, to the best organisations working against it. Go to China, though, and all the people like that are either dead, in jail, or, most likely, too sensible to risk speaking out. Both ways you get some kind of truth, but there's a huge difference between them, and it's the duty of photo-journalists like Cartier-Bresson, surely, to make us aware of this.

It's no surprise, of course, to see all this somewhat skated over in the exhibition commentary. It's what we've come to expect. And in a way perhaps it's no big deal…but, yes, it made me uneasy.