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The sleeping giant stirs

By J. Ross Baughman | Sunday, August 3, 2008

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PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY BY 88 CHINESE PHOTOGRAPHERS

Edited by Liu Heung Shing

Taschen Publishers, $59.99, 424 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY J. ROSS BAUGHMAN

Alexander the Great would have liked to have conquered the entire world, but found his limitations on the doorstep of east Asia. Centuries later, Napoleon knew his own military ambitions would fall short of the same frontier, and supposedly muttered "China is a sleeping giant. But when she awakes the whole world will tremble."

Sigmund Freud, who had a lifelong fascination with ancient Oriental art, also found this metaphor irresistible, except that the father of modern psychology saw in the sleeping giant China's potential for rage, born out of a deep-seated repression of ego and individualism.

Mao Tse Tung, the Marxist revolutionary, with an image of the "sleeping giant" in mind, promised his people that "All that the West has, China will have."

And now, in a book using the work of 88 of his fellow photographers, Liu Heung Shing — also imagining the "giant" — stacks up 412 pictures into a monumental history of the last 60 years in China. And conscious of the metaphor or not, here he has selected more than a few images of the Chinese people asleep.

For instance, a company of the People's Liberation Army in 1954 does not commandeer civilian homes in Henan province, as their rifles might have allowed, but instead lean against buildings in the street and nod off. Flash forward to 2007, as hundreds of pairs of nervous parents sleep on the floor of a school gymnasium while their only children take the all-important final examinations. The scores of these tests will determine the future economic success of each family.

Mr. Liu, the editor and photographic contributor, opens his written recollections with warm and heartfelt candor. He escaped the throes of a three-year famine, from 1960 through 1962, that killed 30 million of his fellow Chinese, only because his father pulled strings, relocating the boy to British-controlled Hong Kong.