Chinese Photojournalist Wen Huang Visits J-School

By Sze Chun Chan

Chinese photojournalist Wen Huang was the subject of a “My Life As…” event on Wednesday night in Javits Lecture Hall. She talked about her experiences as a battlefield photojournalist in the Kosovo War and to showcase some of her work from the conflict.

Huang currently works for Xinhua News Agency, the largest news organization in the People’s Republic of China. She was hired by Xinhua in 1989 as a picture editor after being trained as a photojournalist for four years and graduated with a PhD in Communications from Renmin University in Beijing.

Huang also published a book about the war in Kosovo, “Target," in 2000.

According to Huang, Xinhua distributes thousands of pictures daily in
different countries and has about 60,000 clients worldwide. She started working at a photo desk at Xinhua before she was assigned to Germany and started traveling all over Europe.

“I was living on wheels.” Huang said.

Huang was then sent to cover the Kosovo War during the NATO bombings, which were a part of the ongoing Yugoslav wars that occurred between 1991-2001 and killed more than 140,000 people.

“All (the) other journalists evacuated to Macedonia,” Huang said. “We stayed.”

It was during this period when a NATO bomb hit a Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists-- one of which was Huang’s close colleague. Huang remembers taking portraits of each of her smiling colleagues and then at a later date taking a picture of her colleague lying lifeless in the morgue with her husband mourning. In Huang’s presentation, she told the audience what she remembered as the husband sat next to an empty seat on the flight back where his wife was supposed to be.

“When people get extremely sad, they don’t cry,” Huang said. “It’s just silence.”

Huang remembered people selling flowers on the street everyday and how Yugoslavs coped with a long and constant history of conflict.

“The Yugoslav people were very different, every fifty years there would be war,” Huang said. “If they were killed, they were killed, but if they survived, they survived with dignity.”

Also during the event, Huang mentioned the current state of the media in China, touching upon the 170 million internet users in China and the “Lost Generation” during the Cultural Revolution in the 60s. Chinese citizens during that time had few opportunities to become educated. A large part of the population was being relocated to the rural areas to farm and intellectuals were sent to be reeducated. According to Huang, there are only seven million university graduates in China today, compared to the 1.4 billion population. There have only been 30 years of open policies in China.

“I would like time to tell,” Huang said, regarding censorship in the Chinese media and the future of the press. “Maybe for us, it’s a day-after-day process.”

Huang ended the event with a few parting words to future journalists and those interested in photojournalism. She said that being a young woman could be an advantage in a place like a battlefield. She said she came off as harmless in Kosovo, partly because of her “baby face” and the way she smiled and treated people.

“I survived, but I was really badly hurt by the war mentally,” said Huang, who came back from covering the war physically unscathed. “You will never just be a single observer, you will be a victim.”