Liu Heung Shing, Pulitzer-Winning Photographer and a Man Who Has Seen a Lot | Interviews

Liu Heung Shing believes a photograph — a good one especially — depends more on what the photographer knows than on what he sees.

Liu Heung Shing has been a photojournalist since 1976, first for Time and the Associated Press. Of all the pictures he has taken, the one he considers hardest is the portrait of Gorbachev at the moment the dissolution of the Soviet Union was announced.

The difficulty is obvious. Liu had slipped into the hall with a group, and officers of the KGB, the Soviet Committee for State Security, had warned him not to shoot. Even with nobody stopping him, it was a gamble. He set the shutter at a thirtieth of a second, but catching the blur of the pages as Gorbachev closed his speech still took luck.

The picture, taken on the night of December 25, 1991, in the Kremlin, is regarded as a model of news photography. Liu and his team won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. The Pulitzer is journalism's highest honor.

Before that, Liu had been the Associated Press's Photographer of the Year, an award for the news pictures he took in China. Most of those China photographs look neither as hard to get as the Gorbachev portrait nor as momentous. They belong to the "everyday moments" Liu has always prized and that are now very much in fashion. The years he applied to go to China were unusual — 1976 to 1983, when Mao Zedong died and the Cultural Revolution ended — so these ordinary pictures were also part of an upheaval.

Liu has published more than 10 photo books. In 1983 Penguin published his China After Mao in Britain. In 1992 the Associated Press published USSR: The Collapse of an Empire.

His latest, A Life in a Sea of Red, came out in March this year from the German publisher Steidl. The edit is an interesting one: Liu wanted to show the Soviet collapse and the rise of China at once, so he set pictures from the two places side by side. "There are still many stories in China that have not been reported. Not too many — too few. China has so many anniversaries this year. After the Berlin Wall came down in '89 the Soviet Union fell apart fast, and I happened to be there."

He also quotes Susan Sontag's On Photography to explain why he keeps re-editing his books: as time passes, the context of a photograph changes. It is not the first time he has quoted Sontag — passing few judgments, then restating them on one occasion after another, is a Liu habit too.

Liu Heung Shing was born in Hong Kong in 1951, to a father from Hunan and a mother from Fujian. In 1954, as soon as he could walk, he went back to Fujian with his mother for school. For a child this may not have been the wisest decision. Because his mother's family had been landlords, Liu was classed as a descendant of the "five black categories." The Great Leap Forward brought widespread malnutrition, and it reached every one of the neighbors, who had all moved into the Liu family's private courtyard during the wave of nationalization. Liu wrote about this in his preface to the Chinese edition of China After Mao, published on the mainland in 2009. His prose carries the same astonishing detail as his photographs.

Liu's father was a newspaperman in Hong Kong, and Liu would later say that following him into journalism felt natural. He soon returned to Hong Kong, studied painting for a while, and was discouraged by his lack of talent. He spent most of that time on English and Cantonese; what stayed with him was "during the summer holidays, my father had me translate short Associated Press and Reuters dispatches into Chinese."

In 1970 Liu left Hong Kong to study political science at Hunter College of the City University of New York. In his final year he took a photography class with Gjon Mili, a Life photographer — though Liu had no idea then who Mili was. In hindsight, the course shaped him. After graduating he interned under Mili at Life. Later a Chinese professor at Hunter introduced him to a Harvard classmate: Kelso Sutton, president of Time Inc. When they met, Sutton asked what he wanted to do with his life. "I said right away that I wanted to go to China." A week later a well-known picture editor called.

China and the United States normalized relations on January 1, 1979; Liu got there just ahead of it, becoming in 1978 Time's first foreign photographer based in Beijing. For three years he was the only foreign photographer in the city.

"Put in the right place at the right time." That is how Liu often sums up his career as a photojournalist. Do not mistake it for pure modesty. Some people do get rare chances: they are present when an era turns. But David Remnick and Liu Heung Shing are rarer than that. After years posted in the Soviet Union, Remnick won a Pulitzer in 1994 for Lenin's Tomb, then went home and became editor of The New Yorker.

Liu has explained why it had to be him. Mili is part of the answer. Mili never mentioned aperture, cameras, or depth of field — though he was one of the inventors of flash equipment — but he taught Liu that "you must care deeply about your subject."

"Speaking Mandarin and several provincial dialects did make the work easier for me than for other photographers, but the advantage should not be overrated. This is a country that shuts foreigners out of its major events." Liu wrote in one book's preface that "never once did my reporting or my pictures bring obstruction from the government," but in fact he was interfered with directly several times. Another "hard lesson": the night the Chinese women's volleyball team beat the Americans, while he was photographing the celebrations in the square, his car and his overcoat were splashed with sulfuric acid — something he only discovered afterward.

In the 1970s Liu was influenced by Marc Riboud, whose The Three Banners of China he had read. Others compare him to Henri Cartier-Bresson, who came to China several times in the 1940s and 1950s and left some unforgettable images of it. But the China Liu photographed is nothing like theirs. He thinks he understands the body language of the culture more deeply. He holds to one idea: a photograph — a good one especially — depends more on what the photographer knows than on what he sees.

Tiziano Terzani, former Beijing bureau chief of Der Spiegel, once explained why Liu was so rare, at least for images of China between 1978 and 1983. He said: "In Vietnam, the basic quality of a great photographer is guts. … In China there is no comparable danger; what is needed here is intelligence. The nerve to see past the surface of things, to tear the great net of lies and false impressions woven for people who are easily satisfied and want an easy life. Liu has exactly that enviable courage."

Liu had apparently become a person of consequence, and an anecdote he often tells proves it. "Yao Wei, an official in the Foreign Ministry's Information Department, once called me to a meeting. He told me they had looked into what the foreign press did between 1979 and 1981 and found that 65 percent of the photographs of China published in the West were mine." Liu repeats what Yao said next: "Mr. Liu, please don't work so hard from now on."

The same held in photography circles, if such a circle existed. Penguin published China After Mao in 1983, but the book could not circulate on the mainland. Liu later learned that "Chinese photographers back then would translate the captions, copying them out by hand. There were no photo books about daily life in China. That version is still going around today."

After the Pulitzer in 1991, no one doubted it at all.

For years, to prove himself, Liu took postings anywhere: New Delhi, Punjab, Sri Lanka, Seoul, Moscow, Georgia, Afghanistan. He filed news pictures that ran around the world and piled up experiences most people never have — wiring up his own generator, washing prints over a toilet, a bullet that passed a centimeter from something vital. People always want to ask about all this, which makes him seem more of a legend. It also hardened a trait in him: he would rather solve a problem than complain about it.

In the late 1990s Liu decided to return to Asia. Being a photojournalist was no longer enough, and years in war zones and revolutions had left him with some "compassion fatigue." He shot less. He wanted to start his own publication. "Information is benign." He wanted to help information move more freely in China.

After founding, running, and closing the monthly The Chinese, Liu moved back to Beijing, into a courtyard house on Jingshan West Street. From it he could see the White Pagoda and Jingshan Hill, a detail the fashion press liked to dwell on. His ambition got no easier for it. To this day he has not managed what Remnick did, moving smoothly from fine reporter to editor of an influential publication.

In 1997 Liu became Time Warner's chief representative in China. Three years later he was named executive vice president of News Corporation (China), where he worked to get Star TV's Chinese channel onto Chinese screens. The business was never anything but difficult. He then had short stints at the talent agency CAA and at the Chinese media company Modern Media, neither of which he thinks worth mentioning.

Five years ago Liu moved to Shanghai, to the old French Concession. The Xuhui district government was developing its West Bund cultural projects and had asked him to found the Shanghai Center of Photography. In fact he had worked with Shanghai earlier: he and his partner Karen Smith curated the image-collection campaign for the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo, and, on the Expo's commission, co-edited Shanghai 1842–2010: Portrait of a Great City. In August 2013 he mounted a solo show, "Chinese Dream," at the China Art Museum in Shanghai.

Everyone wants to work with Liu Heung Shing, because he is somebody. But he has not always been "put in the right place at the right time." From his first days as a photojournalist he could make friends and knew how to take a chance. Officials followed what he said and valued his opinion. He is also shrewd enough to refuse the role of mascot.

About this country he holds a few basic judgments. He likes A Cheng's term for it: common sense. "Much of the social and political upheaval and injury of the earlier era came from the loss of common sense. From 1976 to 1983 … the country was taking its first tentative steps toward recovering and rebuilding what A Cheng calls common sense." He says common sense has still not come back, and yet, looking around him, he thinks a great deal can still be done. Which is confusing.

"She will right herself again; she always has." Liu once quoted this from the preface to Lin Yutang's My Country and My People. "She" is China. Most of the time you can read it as Liu's American optimism, together with the peculiar position he holds between insider and outsider.

We met in Hong Kong in March. His pull is undiminished. With the new book out and Art Basel Hong Kong on, he had six talks that week, and our interview happened in the gaps. Crossing a street in Central, he said, sounding sure of it: "The only thing you can do is show them a book. Show them photograph. Not tell them their theory is no good, or his practise is no good."

"It's very like what Deng Xiaoping said back then: no arguing. Without that, China would not be where it is today."

We talked with Liu about a good deal more:

Q: You said that foreigners photographing China have a certain detachment, and see a China different from the one Chinese people see. That is an advantage. But you also said the French — Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud — had a romantic idea of China. That sounds like a weakness.

Not all French people are like that. Those two came from relatively bourgeois, relatively comfortable families. I went to France often in the 1980s. After the French did away with their emperor, they took a different road from Britain's industrial revolution, but in both countries the attitude toward class is very plain. If you read French history, early on they imagined a superior culture in the East — imagined is the word — a highly trained bureaucracy, a civilized state, and they used it to attack the French king of the day. None of these people had been to China.

Cartier-Bresson's family, for instance, was a very rich textile family. He was in the French Communist Party, though not a very active member. There is a little of that in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, when some members also came from very good families. So when they came to China, part of them sympathized with communism and wanted an equal society. And they had a French romanticism in them by instinct. Put the two together and the China they photographed is a China Chinese people are comfortable looking at.

Magnum now has a few French photographers shooting China, like Patrick Zachmann, a later generation. They don't carry that semi-aristocratic worldview.

Q: How would you describe your own position, your point of view? Your background is very complicated.

One thing that matters a great deal in photography has to do with cultural and emotional formation. I photograph my own people. But my education wasn't only American; the moment I finished university I went to report in Spain and France. I met Song Huai-Kuei in Paris very early on. She had just arrived too. Her marriage to the Bulgarian artist Maryn Varbanov was approved by Zhou Enlai himself. In Paris they lived in an artists' building. After that I went back to France many, many times.

An American-born Chinese who grew up entirely in the States would be different again. And I'm not the only artist or photographer who went west. So it is the influence of several cultures. And I am very interested in China. My father was a newspaperman at Ta Kung Pao. In the Hong Kong of that time, Ta Kung Pao was a progressive paper. But when the Americans landed on the moon, you couldn't run it — no different from today. Cao Juren sat across the desk from him. These were men of letters. Still they had a certain — you know Ta Kung Pao started as a Shanghai paper, and it seems to have been the first Chinese-language paper to send a reporter to cover the First World War. When Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China was translated into Chinese, people put up the money themselves. Back then they had a positive, intellectual appetite for new possibilities.

So last night I said (referring to his lecture and conversation at the University of Hong Kong) that May Fourth was China's first enlightenment, at least for the literati. Then the late 1970s and early 1980s were the second.

If I hadn't reported the Stars Art Exhibition, probably nobody would know about it today. There were other artists at the Democracy Wall too, with no connection to any government body. They also strung up a clothesline with pegs and hung their own work on it.

Q: Many historians, art historians especially, point out that recording the present is hard, because at the time you cannot judge who matters or who history will remember. After the Artists Association put out its "Open Declaration of Painting Societies," there may have been a dozen or so similar groups in Beijing.

Yes, and the April Photo Society.

Q: How did you know which things mattered, which were worth recording?

There was no such awareness at the time. There were also the first writers with a feminist consciousness, and scar literature, and publishers bringing out foreign books on everything — politics, philosophy, literature, all of it translated. Publishing opened up all at once. The state had always budgeted for publishing, and before that there had been little worth printing; suddenly the climate changed and they printed everything. Renmin University students joined the demonstrations then; the Second Artillery Corps had taken over their campus, so they marched. I photographed the Peking opera actress Zhao Yanxia leaving the state system to start her own troupe. Agriculture was going over to the household responsibility system. The whole society was walking out of the shape of the previous era.

The Democracy Wall had plenty of dissidents and a pile of unofficial journals. You've seen my photograph — I climbed on top of the Democracy Wall, and all those people were holding a few mao to buy the magazines. That is why I call it the second enlightenment. Looking back, though, especially after '89, or even after '83, Deng Xiaoping criticized Bai Hua's Unrequited Love and Yuan Yunsheng's nude mural (note: Yuan's 1979 mural for the Capital International Airport included nude young women; it was covered up in 1980 and boarded over in 1982). Ideologically things went backward again.

Q: Listening to your talks, your account of history is gentler than that of other people who lived through it. These past few days I have watched a lot of people try to get a Western view of China out of you. Judging by their reactions, your answers don't satisfy them. Why is that?

I think the West has its own narrative now, the mainland has its own way of telling things, and Hong Kong and Taiwan are different again. My education tells me you tell a story with details. In the end a picture is also a detail; what you photograph are the details of the life we live. That may just be my habit of watching things after all these years. When I argue a point or a view with someone, I feel that things … things aren't black and white, they're gray. So in an information age that runs 24 hours a day from every direction, I think people read and see things in an increasingly black-and-white way.

Things keep changing. Fukuyama thought the fall of the Berlin Wall was the end of history. I photographed the moment Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union broke up, but history doesn't stop in a moment; it goes on. I sometimes find myself telling Americans that China isn't like that, and telling Chinese people that China isn't what you think either, and telling Hong Kong people to relax, to open up. Young people here don't know what Hong Kong used to be like. They keep saying that after '97 things became this and that. One Country, Two Systems has run for 20 years, and enormous effort has gone into keeping it going on every front. Move the noise aside and it is no different from the Hong Kong I know.

Q: Has "things are gray" been your view since the 1970s, or did it come slowly?

Slowly, very slowly. People say read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles. I've been to so many places — not somewhere for a few weeks or months, but for years, many springs, summers, autumns, and winters in each. I think leisure matters enormously to how a person lives and learns. Listening to people while you are at ease. Rather than not taking in what someone says because you are waiting to give your own view. That process — well, people see it differently. Different people handle things differently.

Q: You have described how a foreign correspondent works. "Basically you stay in one place for four or five years. The head office in New York never told us what to photograph, apart from major events. The editors told us: you are our paper's eyes and ears; you are in India, in China, in the Soviet Union; you tell us what is happening there. Western mainstream media have always run on this idea. So our job may just be to make friends. Friends tell me about their society, their country, and I come with an unfamiliar eye to learn and to feel — that is really what reporting is for."

In China in the 1970s and 1980s, you made friends not only with artists but with Xinhua reporters, and you dealt with government officials. How did you make those friends?

Mr. Luce, who was born in China, founded Time, Fortune, and Life. When he started Life he wrote something to this effect: to see life, look at the swagger of the people with power and money, and look at how the poor live. Look at the women men love, and the men women love. Life is observed, and it inspires you, and it moves you. Then life is interesting. The American reading of that is a kind of humanism. It puts a journalist, or a photographer's eye and inspiration, in exactly the right place.

Q: Making friends is a skill in itself. How, specifically, did you make friends with these people?

You are sincere with people. What you bring into the conversation … the way you talk decides whether the other person wants to talk to you at all. I often find that people won't tell their own parents things they will tell a stranger. And who is that stranger? I go to interview and photograph people, and I get interviewed and photographed myself. More than once I have watched an interview fail. The knowledge the person brings is strange. He wants to take you somewhere that doesn't exist. "What do you like best …" He takes the most interesting things in life and society, and the way he describes each one … he has already reached his conclusions, and he wants to fit me into them.

Q: You photographed so much daily life in China — two lovers with their feet crossed, showing intimacy. Could Westerners read what it meant?

Yes. Look at what people like Fox Butterfield (note: from 1978 to 1981 the first Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times) wrote; they all used the same word, intimacy. They said very few photographers got that close to Chinese people. I am Chinese too, but the trouble was that other Chinese photographers simply could not see the thing at all, or they would say, what has that got to do with us. For them, you had to get inside the Great Hall of the People to prove you were a photojournalist.

There is a photographer in Guangdong, An Ge, who was in Hong Kong then. I passed through once and he came to talk to me. I told him he was wasting his time in Hong Kong and should go straight back. Don't go off to Tibet or Xinjiang — photograph the Guangdong you know, the things around you. I knew that inside the China News Service they were never going to send him here today and there tomorrow, or give him three or five years, so the most practical advice I could give him was to photograph well the place he knew. He did go back, and later published a book, China After Deng.

When photographers in Beijing saw China After Mao, Wang Wenlan, chief photographer at China Daily, said it was like being hit on the head with a hammer. That book really did shape a generation of photographers.

Q: Let's talk about you. From the late 1990s you photographed less. Back to my first question: when you first came to China you had a detachment that let you see different things; later you became more and more involved in China's development, including Time Warner's and News Corporation's projects here, Modern Media, and more work with the Shanghai government. Did the deeper involvement stop you photographing?

Modern Media was actually very brief. Most of my time went to News Corporation and Time Warner. They asked me to do some things for them in China. I don't know whether you know about the monthly I started in Hong Kong.

Q: The Chinese.

Yes. In the West it is a natural progression for a reporter or a photographer to become an editor-in-chief.

After Moscow, my options were the White House or the European Union. By then I already felt that kind of assignment, that kind of work, wasn't what I wanted to do. India, the former Soviet Union, China — those I found interesting. And Sondhi Limthongkul, now the leader of Thailand's Yellow Shirts, was printing my book at the time, so we met in Bangkok. He said, come back. I said, come back to Asia to do what? He wanted to be Asia's Murdoch. He had bought some American magazines, and his printing plant in Thailand was the biggest in Asia. He had his own Manager newspaper, still influential in Bangkok today, Thailand's equivalent of the FT. He urged me to come back to Asia. And he had put his finger on what I wanted anyway — to come back to Asia, back to China. Because I felt China's story was nowhere near finished.

From the age of 26 I was inside the most mainstream of American media, and posted to China. I very much hoped that once reform and opening had gone far enough, the next wave would be the opening of the media, because for a society to advance — the capacity to make hardware, the capacity to produce, that is already there; Chinese people are practical and hardworking. But building a larger, more civilized country takes humanistic development. So I thought of media as a platform, a way to show another kind of social force to ourselves and to the world. Our talk, the way we speak, is always in quotations and slogans. That is not the finest civilization. So I always wanted very good pictures and very good writing. That was what The Chinese was meant to do.

Why did it close so soon? The 1997 financial crisis started in Thailand, and the Thai Farmers Bank wanted back the 10 billion it had lent Mr. Sondhi. I went back to the old Time Warner to save my magazine. I said, buy it. They leafed through it and said, the magazine is good, but we don't publish in Chinese; better come back to us. So I went, and for those two groups I got the very difficult things done, like getting television channels carried in China. You know how hard that is here — especially Murdoch's Star TV, a channel the Chinese government had never even laid eyes on, starting from nothing, and you have to get it carried.

But at the time they didn't even know where the door was, so it was exhausting work. Later it was sold to China Media Capital, who worked out how to bring Star into Guangdong as a production company making programs. Murdoch's News Corporation producers were all foreigners; making content in China cost a lot, the subjects weren't necessarily what Chinese audiences wanted to watch, they couldn't pull in advertising, and they couldn't break through.

Q: How did you get them carried? It looks as though it takes a great many connections and resources. How did you have them?

I had chances to talk with China's leaders. If you open a car factory, they see a business. My point was that media is also a business, an industry, and that if you deal with Europe and America but won't let these media companies operate in China at all, won't let them do a thing, then you have no influence whatsoever over the media industry. That went in.

Q: Did they want to use it to show their influence?

No. Influence is sometimes mutual restraint. The New York Times restrains The Washington Post, and the other way round. If they do nothing in China, then they can say whatever they like about China, because you have not the slightest hold on them. I mean that positively — not that you use it to do your propaganda, which is completely impossible.

It is the friendliest way for both sides to protect their own national and social interests. What Chinese people say, the world can't follow. I don't know whether you have noticed, but that way of putting things doesn't get through to anyone. And the Western version, apart from internal reference reports and Reference News, basically doesn't get in either.

Q: Do you have ambitions to build a media group yourself?

No. I'm not a good manager.

I have always had an instinct: information is benign in itself. And within that you have to allow different views, but you don't need to rush to a conclusion about this one or that one. Last week the president of Harvard spoke at Peking University, and all of it came down to this. If China doesn't develop good media, then I think we sadly hand over the right to speak about the humanities, about human rights, all of these questions, to other people. Westerners take humanistic values as universal values. Then universal values are not Europe's alone. But if you don't state your view, you have given up your universal values.

Q: You think there are two different sets of universal values.

There can be more than two. But you have to say clearly what your values are. China hasn't been very successful at this, because of the language it uses and the means. If you want to be a superpower, to stand as an equal with everyone, you should tell them where your values lie.

Q: You think it is only a matter of language and means?

It is a matter of mentality.

Q: In the 1990s you moved to Beijing and lived in a courtyard house. In 2014 you moved to Shanghai. Was moving to Shanghai a big change for you?

Yes. It was also a return to something. I built the Shanghai Center of Photography (SCôP). You let people see. Photography as an art, as a language. What you can say with it, how you say it. How to put an exhibition together. Talking about that is one thing; making it is another. When I was at university in the United States I went to see the ICP, the International Center of Photography. And I thought: so a picture has this kind of power.

The Xuhui district party secretary and his colleagues wanted to build the West Bund cultural corridor. They said, Mr. Liu, come to Shanghai.

Put it this way and you'll understand: from my first day of work, very consistent. Through the photographic image, through language, through reporting, through the record — including China After Mao or this new book — I am telling you what China is, as I see it.

Q: Are you unusually alert to opportunities and platforms? Very few people seized the chance the AP and Time offered to come to China. And when the Xuhui government made you its offer, you saw you might build a photography center like the ICP.

But plenty of people say Liu Heung Shing was lucky. They don't say Liu Heung Shing worked hard. Opportunity is made for those who are ready.

The building for the Shanghai Center of Photography on the West Bund had to be rebuilt. For ten months of dealing with them I was effectively a laborer on site. China does have the mechanism for it. But neither the West Bund nor the Xuhui district government was going to send someone to do it for me. If SCôP is a small museum, it holds to the standards of a small museum. Exhibitions have standards of quality; the Chinese and English texts have to read properly to a Westerner. So everything, however big or small, comes down to detail.

Q: You are hands-on.

Yes, yes, yes. That comes from being a correspondent too. The paper pays out a very, very long line and never reels it in, unless you have failed.

But an outfit like that doesn't say, go to California, go to our important bureau out west. They say, you don't need to come east; we already know you can cover politics, so don't go to Washington. Go somewhere in the west. Then you learn how a thousand-odd American newspapers actually work. I gave up a sunny house in Southern California to go to India, and not one of my AP colleagues understood it. They came into the darkroom: "I hear you're going to India? Every AP reporter wants Southern California. You've only just got out of China, and now you want to run off to India — is something wrong with you?"

Q: Really? AP reporters had no ambition to report?

What did you think? The AP doesn't have that many foreign postings. I understood it perfectly. In China they'd say, you're Chinese, your Chinese is such and such, you have a natural advantage. I said, I'll go to India to prove myself. In India I had no advantage at all.

Q: You went in order to prove yourself.

Yes, exactly. I opened all the photo bureaus in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan. When the Soviets marched into Afghanistan, I was the first Western journalist to get in. I was based in New Delhi and drank whiskey with Afghan diplomats day after day until one of them gave me a visa. Once inside, in the field, what do you do when the fax machine has no power? I rented a generator; then there was no diesel, so I bought diesel from Soviet soldiers to run it. Otherwise you can't file. Normally you tell the office your computer has no power and everyone accepts that. But as a war correspondent, as a foreign correspondent, you don't tell people what your troubles are, because whether it is page one or page 10, if you are not in tomorrow's paper you don't exist.

Q: That must have shaped the way you work. Always wanting to solve the problem.

I think it was good training for me.

Q: In 2013 you published the photo book Chinese Dream. In an earlier interview you said the phrase was your own, and had nothing to do with the "Chinese Dream" the state later adopted.

Right. They wanted to give me an exhibition then. My Chinese Dream was the China I had watched — I had a time frame: by the start of the 21st century, in the first- and second-tier cities, materially, Chinese people's dream had already come true. In the 1950s and 1960s a single cigarette could get a thing done for you. The exhibition was about how that process went.

Q: Later, when the phrase became official language and was everywhere, did you want to keep clear of it, to draw a line between the two?

I did want to draw a line. Because that big Chinese Dream of theirs needs exactly the things I have been talking to you about today, and they haven't done them, or don't know how.

Q: At the China Club just now, and in our conversation, you suggested that political leaders come and go but a photographer always has the chance to catch a moving moment in ordinary life. Have you seen any recent Chinese photography that catches those everyday moments?

Chinese photographers have a problem, as I see it: they carry something unexamined and grand around with them. They understand photography as speech rather than as image. For a long time China has held a theory, very official and widely accepted, that the caption matters more than the picture.

Today, of course, there are a great many young people, and sometimes they are in a hurry to copy the West, new and different styles, or fashion. I understand the impulse. Chinese people are still in a hurry about everything. Wanting truly to be part of the world, to connect with it — I understand that. But they don't have the humanistic training to notice detail. Detail is what the language of photography does best. For an observant person, photography is an important tool, but you have to be interested in the thing itself. So last night I told the people at the University of Hong Kong: you need curiosity. Curiosity is the intelligence to understand the things you are curious about.

And Chinese photography has another problem: the media. Chinese media cannot walk alongside the world's media. Foreign media can't see it, and Chinese media isn't up to it. Look at the pictures, even in a monthly. Western magazines have built up rules and standards over many years, ways of telling a story. You grow up soaked in that. Here we say we are good — by what standard do you say so? You see someone's photographs and they have never been published. So media is an enabler, a platform where people can show their work, be seen, be criticized. That is how you get better. If you write an article and nobody reads it, and nobody tells you what they thought of it, then you are just one person on your own.

Chinese media often runs to heroics. It thinks the media is a watchdog. It has swallowed Western media theory whole and can't digest it. Chinese journalists all want prizes; only a prize gives you a platform and the right to speak. I have never once in my life applied for an award. They were all given to me.

I was a foreign correspondent for more than twenty years, and not once did I have to sit in a meeting with anyone. I just went and did the work I had to do. You arrive in a different country; without friends, how do you find out about that society, how do you understand it more deeply, where its worth lies?

Q: Your position is still unusual. Compared with photographers and reporters inside China, you are in between, and that gives you more room.

Yes. No doubt about that. But Xinhua and the People's Daily post people abroad too.

Q: Which brings us to the difference between Xinhua and the Associated Press.

No — the AP also posts photographers all over the world. After I left, ethnic Chinese reporters became fairly common at Reuters and the AP. In every era there are plenty of people with that special position. They are no different from me. The question is what you do with the work. So it comes back to the individual. What you learn, what you grasp, how you watch things. How you see. Whether you listen closely when people talk. Listen closely and you will be given something that helps you. Isn't that what we do every day?

In our line of work, the reader deserves the most respect. You are not facing one reader but a very large body of them. You should understand something about yourself: readers are smart, so don't try to fool them. If a journalist spends all his time wanting to be a hero, one thing follows — you start lecturing your readers, instructing them, "I know more than you do." That is badly wrong.

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and the photographs in this article were provided by Liu Heung Shing. Long cover image by Cai Xiaochuan.