“From AsiaSociety.Org:
In China, 1979 marked a period of easing toward the West. For the first time after almost a generation of secrecy, the Chinese government was taking its own people (and the outside world) into its confidence. The official organ, the Xinhua News Agency, was reporting basic information and statistics on employment, the national income, the budget, the harvest, industrial quotas, consumer goods, and much else that had been a mystery before. To get people moving, economic incentives were to replace ideology. The Chinese were taking a heavy gamble that they could become a world power by the year 2000. It was a time of openness that made my work a joy.
It seemed to me that in China there was none of the monotonous gray conformity I had seen in Russia. Instead, there was uniformity, yet within it a startling diversity. I had expected every commune to be like every other commune, and every factory to be set up according to directives from a central plan. This was not so. Each unit solved its own problems in its own way and according to its own needs-although, granted, within the framework set up by the Communist Party. What constantly impressed me was the spirit of the people. China had just emerged from ten years of Cultural Revolution, of purge and counterpurge, of destruction of her past and violence to her future--and possessed a whole generation of young who had been the victims of upheaval. I was surprised on two scores: how far the Chinese had come in thirty years, and how far they still had to go to leave behind the backbreaking physical labor in which millions remain engaged. China considers herself both a Third World country (Mao Zedong's phrase) and a developing country. In Xishuang Banna a group of peasants said to me, Yes, ours is still the ancient way of toil: peasants still ride water buffalo to level the land, and plant the rice shoots by hand. But there have been enormous changes for us since Liberation. The rice paddies have been cleaned up; there are medical care, retirement pensions, old-age benefits, and education for our children. We are involved in building a better world for our children. Yes, said an old man:
For our sons,
For our sons' sons, and
For ten thousand generations to come.
-Eve Arnold
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EVE ARNOLD was born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents. She began her career managing a photo-finishing plant. In 1948, she studied photography with Alexy Brodovich at the New School for Social Research in New York. She has won international recognition for her many photo essays on Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, as well as for her portraits of personalities in the arts, politics, and cinema, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Marilyn Monroe. Arnold became a member of Magnum Photos in 1951. ”
