In today’s People’s Republic of China, little is explicitly Communist, save perhaps the Chinese Communist Party itself. The country’s socialist period is rife with thorny, unprobed complexities, a legacy so fraught and out of step with that of today’s economic ascendancy that it is often completely sidestepped in discussions of China’s contemporary economy and culture. Yet even if its influence may not always be evident, the Communist legacy continues to inform the very structure of Chinese society.

A recent exhibition of photographs from rural northern China in the period between the end of World War II and the founding of the PRC raised questions about this legacy indirectly, through the topic of rural land reform. It featured black-and-white images by David Crook, a British Communist who with his wife, Isabel, wrote important books on the new China, both of them in the process becoming lifelong residents of the country and witnesses to the better part of its twentieth century; and by Wu Qun and Gao Liang, early Communist military photographers who documented rural life, civil war, and early reorganizations of land rights in the preliberation period. Although rural land reform might seem tangential to the concerns of contemporary art, in fact it is the defining policy of the CCP as a Communist party, and the distinctions between rural and urban are a defining feature of Chinese society.

The exhibition was split into two galleries, one devoted to photographs taken by Crook, the other to those of Wu and Gao. All of them travelled through liberated areas of northern China, where the CCP was implementing early land reform, a process that would spread through nearly the entire country by 1953. Although the three photographers took the same geographic area and rural Chinese peasantry as their subject, they had different motivations for their work. Crook’s images document the eight months he and his wife spent living in a Hebei Province village called the Ten Mile Inn. With a letter of introduction from the British Communist Party, the couple—David credentialed as a stringer for Reuters and The Times, Isabel as a doctoral student in anthropology at Victoria University in Toronto—arrived in November 1947, specifically intending to record the process of land reform. In contrast, Wu and Gao documented historical events as they unfolded, contributing images to publications such as the Jinchaji Pictorial, whose editors believed the press could both inform and inspire the nation.

While Wu and Gao documented landlord denunciations, Crook lingered over weddings, funerals, and scenes of daily life that strikingly demonstrate how little such villages have changed since then. Several of the photographs by Wu and Gao were presented with enlarged reproductions of the comments written on the back: A photograph by Gao of a toddler wearing two bangles with a bun in her hand appears next to the words A LANDLORD’S CHILD. LOOK AT HER, THE CLOTHES SHE WEARS, THE FOOD SHE EATS, THE ORNAMENTS SHE WEARS. Another series of photographs by Gao, titled “People who got a share of land,” features ruddy-faced peasants in the fields, beaming as they pose with farming tools in their hands. Photographed with their torsos over the horizon in deliberate emphasis of the dignity of the labor, their figures dominate the frame.

By asking visitors to reconsider this history, this exhibition also invited them to reflect on the present. Somewhere along the way, the inversion of power that was meant to address the inequality between landlords and the lower classes flipped again: Today, although farmland is still owned by the state, land redistribution and development by corrupt local governments have become primary sources of social discontent in China, in stark contrast to the documented past.

—Angie Baecker