There's a gallery at The Big Picture - as there seems to be every year - on the Harbin International Ice and Snow festival. All very jolly and colourful.
Earlier this week I was at the Barbican exhibition Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s. One of the featured photographer's is Li Zhensheng, a photojournalist who covered the Cultural Revolution in Harbin and the surrounding area in the late Sixties. At the time he could only publish happy images of smiling Red Guards praising Chairman Mao: he hid the rest - the photos showing the brutality, the firing squads, the ritual humiliations - under the floorboards of his house till they were finally published in 1988 (in the West; they're still unpublished in China). They form one of the best testimonies to the horrors of that period that we have:
There's a good selection of Li's photos at the NYT; see also the BBC slideshow.
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