NOTE: SCROLL DOWN TO GET A CONTINUOUS PLAYLIST VIEW OF THIS VIDEO

​

I was invited to return to Tangshan, China in July 2006 for an exhibition of photos I took of the city in March-April 1972. In July 1976, Tangshan was hit be a devastating earthquake that leveled the city and killed at least 240,000 people.

 

My photos were perhaps the only surviving color images of "daily life" in Tangshan in the years just before the earthquake. In 1972, China was still in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong's ideological crusade to purge the country of all counterrevolutionary and "bourgeois" elements and to keep the People's Republic on the path to his radical vision of socialism and communism. In that way, too, my photos capture a time long past in China's modern history. The posted videos are from a film made for showing on China Central Television as part of the 30th anniversary of the Great Earthquake of 1976.

 

This video was made by a crew from China Central Television to be shown on the program "Society in the News" as part of the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the earthquake. It never aired on CCTV because the censors judged it to be too nostalgic.