At ease: Hou Bo’s portrait of Mao and family at the seaside
When Mao Zedong proclaimed his new Socialist China in October 1949 from the great gate of Tiananmen, he walked to the balcony’s edge, looked over to the cheering crowds, and called out: “Long live the people!” Moments later, he was captured by the photographer Hou Bo, in that now-famous image, as he declared into the microphone: “The Chinese people have stood up.”
In the photograph, we don’t see the Chinese people themselves, listening in the square below. Mention of them – and even the greeting Mao had used – would soon become subversive. The next time Tiananmen Square would hear “Long live the people!” was 40 years later, when it was shouted by students calling for democracy, shortly before the tanks moved in.
The photograph of Mao on the balcony can now be seen in a fascinating and disturbing exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, that is largely devoted to the work of Hou Bo and Xu Xiaobing, the husband-and-wife team who became Mao’s official photographers.
– Monster at the Beach, The Guardian, April 10, 2004
