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By Newsweek Editors
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What kinds of images of war-torn countries should influential news organizations show? The question currently looms large, as arguments rage over which satellite-fed images from the Middle East should be aired on television. And it grants an eerie timeliness to "Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution" (141 pages. University of California Press)--even though it's been more than five decades since Jack Birns shot these startling images while covering Asia for Life magazine.
The book is unexpectedly topical for two reasons. First, as Carolyn Wakeman, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, notes in her introduction, back in the 1940s a Life photograph functioned in the same way that a dramatic piece of CNN footage does today: as a powerful shaper of popular opinion about an international event. And second, despite the high esthetic value and poignancy of the images in "Assignment Shanghai," most were buried because of political sensitivities at the time.
To put it bluntly, Birns portrayed all too accurately China's troubled state on the eve of the communist victory in 1949. His photos range from disturbing shots of children's corpses and the severed head of an executed communist to lighter pictures that convey the rhythm and texture of urban life during China's civil war. The camera reveals a country coming apart at the seams, due largely to the corrupt, oppressive nature of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime. What's clear in them is the obscene gulf that separated the lifestyles of a few wealthy Chinese and privileged foreigners (including U.S. servicemen) from those of the country's ordinary citizens. Looking at these pictures, it is easy to see why so many Chinese embraced a revolutionary movement calling for total transformation.
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This image of late-1940s China was in keeping with the written reports filed by the best foreign journalists at the time. But it undermined a notion that Time-Life chief Henry Luce--born in China to missionary parents--held dear and insisted his influential publications disseminate: namely that the fervently anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek, a Christian convert, was China's only hope for salvation. So while Life frequently ran shots that Birns took of other Asian hotspots, his China photos were routinely rejected.
Curious to see what Life was saying about China while refusing to publish such shots, I rifled through issues from 1948 and discovered a glowing account of a national election--from which, of course, communist candidates were excluded. One story stresses that, though Chiang Kai-shek won by the predicted landslide, his favorite was not elected vice president. This, readers were told, showed that the Republic of China was evolving rapidly into a "mature" pluralist state. It is true that the ROC (since 1949 located on Taiwan) has indeed become just that, but the transition was hardly swift. Throughout most of the second half of the 20th century, one-party regimes and harsh repression of dissent were the rule on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
In fact, the pictures in "Assignment Shanghai" are notable for their foreshadowing of events to come. Several photos portray confrontations between agents of the state and unarmed protesters. It is hard to look at these--especially a 1948 photograph showing a Nationalist Army tank stationed menacingly outside a university's main gate--without thinking of Tiananmen Square and the Communist Party's brutal 1989 crackdown. That's not to say that the world would have been any less shocked by such a tragedy if it had been privy to images such as Birns's earlier. But they certainly help us make sense of China's political traumas in a way that earlier readers would no doubt have welcomed, too.
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