Jack Birns fulfilled a boyhood dream when he embarked on a voyage to China in December 1947 with three German cameras he had obtained for ten cents. Amidst the poverty, corruption, and chaos of expanding civil war, the reality was something else: refugees and prostitutes, soldiers and beggars, street executions and urban protests.
As war pressed ever closer to the country’s financial, cultural, and commercial capital, Birns focused his camera on the unfolding human drama as the ruling party fought the Communist threat for more than two decades. In an attempt to show China’s misery up close, he ran afoul of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce’s fervent anti-communism, and many of these photographs went unpublished for half a century. From the standpoint of hindsight, Birns’ photographs give us a sense of what China was like more than fifty years ago and why the warfare, weariness, and desperation were such fertile soil for the communist revolution.
Today these everyday scenes of ordinary people—pedicab drivers, street vendors, bar girls, police, politicians, prisoners—tell a story of national resilience and dignity in the midst of enveloping poverty, repression, and fear. Bruns’ stark black and white photographs capture the dramatic end of an era, but they also hint at the city’s commercial and cultural revival in the 1990s.
