Among journalists based in China through the early years of reform, I admire the work of John Gittings, whose books such as Real China: From cannibalism to karaoke (1996) and The changing face of China (2005) make useful background to our studies.

Stories that appear to be told by still images are beguiling yet facile. I’ve been appreciating Gittings’ recent blogposts (here and here) in which he reflects on the relationship between words and photos in his coverage for the Guardian from 1978 until he retired in 2003.

Looking through my selection, I can see that many fall into one of three different types. There are those that contain visual pointers or signals—perhaps missed by me at the time they were taken—which add meaning to what is shown and what is remembered. A second type invites the viewer to reflect on the hidden history behind their subject matter—a more speculative delving into the past. Then there are a small number that cast retrospective doubt on what I wrote at the time: that can be unsettling.

Alongside telling images of Tiananmen in 1980 and 1989 are photos of his trips further afield. At the Qilin temple, Shandong, in 1997:

Many of the attenders were elderly women such as these, who had been brought from other villages on open-backed tractor-trailers. They burnt incense in front of the temple, and each was given a box of cookies. Studying their faces now, I can see that they are very tired: it may have been a long way back to their homes. And I wonder about their long, hidden, history too. Age is always hard to estimate but the oldest ones may have been born not long after the fall of the Qing dynasty. They would have experienced warlord upheavals, floods and famine, Japanese atrocities, revolutionary war, land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and more. What memories from the past were revived when they attended the re-opening of the Qilin temple?

Anhui, 1982:

The old village houses are built in rows, with packed mud walls, tamped mud floor, and a thick thatched roof now dripping in the spring rain. Small children peer out of front doors, buffalo and oxen huddle close to the back doors. A few chickens scurry in the liquid mud. Fengyang County in Anhui province has always been desperately poor, and is only slowly beginning to change. There  had been some improvement after the 1949 Communist victory, but Mao’s Great Leap Forward was a disaster. People ate dogs to survive, and in 1959–61, one in six of the population died “in an irregular manner”—the euphemism for starvation. I have been taken to Kaocheng, till recently a People’s Commune but now part of a pilot experiment for the Commune to be replaced by a new structure that returns power to the local area. It has already been the pace-setter for the rest of Anhui province, trialling a new “responsibility system” that allows peasants some freedoms to farm the land. They are assigned a plot of state-owned land and have to contribute a fixed quota of their produce, but can decide what else to grow and sell it for themselves. The traditional village markets have re-appeared—I saw a huge cattle-fair under way on a dried-up river bed—and small-scale businesses are no longer banned as “sprouts of capitalism”.

Urumqi, 1978:

Sometimes the images that I revisit now do not chime with the words that I wrote then, and the retrospective doubts that this raises are hard to resolve. On my first solo trip to China, I interviewed the imam of the main mosque in Urumqi, which had not long re-opened, and I then took the photo above of him at the mosque entrance, together with members of his committee. In the story I wrote at the time, I described the imam as having given a “cheerful” account of the mosque’s revived fortune. That adjective could not be applied to this photo. Were they just being solemn for the camera, or had I been misled by the “short introduction” (carefully prepared with the relevant authorities) that the imam had just delivered?  The photo would not have been developed till I returned to England, and probably after I had written up the story. Does it suggest a rather less “cheerful” situation?

Another image from 1978:

The Muslim minorities, Uighur and Kazakh, in this farthest west corner of China had a hard time during the Cultural Revolution. “They closed the mosques, and would not let people wear their caps”, I am told in late 1978. The Arabic script had been replaced by a Roman alphabet that few could understand, and the history of the minorities was suppressed. Local organisations including street committees were only now being “restored”. I am taken to a new “workers’ home” to see how life is so much better. The bearded patriarch Tuerdi had 82 direct descendants down to his great-grandchildren. His youngest daughter has returned from teacher training college in Wuhan (she is on the right). On the left are Tuerdi and his wife; next to them is the head of the Street Committee whom I describe in my notes as “trying to interrupt whenever possible”. Behind her is a friendly neighbour, the only person who is smiling. The positions adopted in the photo are revealing: the Han Chinese cadre is in the centre background; his Uighur colleague next to him. I also note that Uighur cadres behave “with an air of deference” towards their Han superiors.

Considering a photo he took on a trip to Qinghai in 2003, Gittings reflects:

High up on a dusty plateau in the village of Taktser, Qinghai province, lies the only shrine to the Dalai Lama to be found in China. It is in the house where he was born, and is lovingly cared for by his nephew (shown here). On the altar is a letter written in the Dalai’s own hand. “I was born here with the name of Lhamo Dhundup,” it reads. “I was discovered to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama and went away. I have never forgotten my home village. I pray for its people and hope they are safe.” A wide valley stretches in the distance to Mount Tsongkhapa whose peak, say the villagers, resembles the Buddha’s head. The balcony outside the house looks across a courtyard decked with prayer flags to a village that has changed very little since 1938, when a search party of high-ranking lamas found the three-year-old Dalai. In 1986 the Chinese government rebuilt the family home, which had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, as a gesture in its dialogue with the Tibetan government in exile. Yet no agreement has ever been reached: the house is closed to pilgrims (and as a foreign journalist I am not supposed to be there).  “The people of Tibet weep every night and pray for him to return”, I am told. “We are five or six million Tibetans, scattered over a vast land. We can do nothing without him.”

Cf. roundups of my posts on Uyghur and Tibetan cultures; as well as Maoism and the famine, and Images from the Maoist era.

Like journalists, ethnographers often resort to “hit-and-run” visits for surveys of a region. Even when they make a base in one locale over a longer period, photos may give a misleading impression of timelessness—and this is just as true for images of ritual performance. We should always connect “snapshots” to their broader context, as I have sought to do for Gaoluo and the Li family Daoists. Against the backdrop of changing society, there are always personal stories to tell.

North Xinzhuang, Beijing suburbs 1959.