57 years old, photographer

In Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Liu Heung-shing’s own words, the defining characteristics of a hero are “intellect plus courage”. If what he says is true, then he well and truly deserves his place on our list.

Born in Hong Kong in 1951, to a mainland Chinese father who was the Hong Kong correspondent for a Beijing newspaper, Liu was sent to Fujian to go to school. There he was thrown in with a dominating, elite group of classmates, who would make him feel how much he belonged to what they called the ‘Black Five Elements’ (landlords, wealthy peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists). "It was a very traumatic experience for me,” says Liu, “even if it only lasted about five years. I was always being bullied or made an outcast.”

However traumatic, this childhood inspired Liu to study political science at Hunter College in the USA, where he was introduced to photography and asked to work as an intern at Life magazine. Over the years, he also found time to search for his own heroes: “John Needham was a scientist guru from Cambridge,” explains Liu. “He had an affair with a Chinese girl and then went to China and wrote the 24 volumes of Science and Civilization of China. He played a large part in influencing how the West thinks about China. One man who has this kind of influence is my kind of hero. In 1941, when there was a quasi united front between the KMT and Mao Zedong's communists, he took off from Dongguan to Chongqing, claiming that he saw more of China than Mao's Long Marchers. He claimed to have travelled 30,000 miles compared to Mao's Red Army who marched 8,000 miles.”

While he may have walked a little less than this, Liu has also contributed to helping the West understand China, becoming Time magazine’s first photojournalist based in Beijing in the seventies. From there, he covered the death of Mao in 1976, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. In 1992, Liu won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography, and, most recently, he edited a history of Chinese photography since 1949 for Taschen, titled China: Portrait of a Country.

In 1997, Liu moved back to Beijing, and has been enjoying the contrasts between his memories and the present day on a daily basis. “The main Qianmen area has been redeveloped but just one block behind is still the old Qianmen. I used to go there for duck in the seventies and you'd still see the camel caravans,” recalls Liu. “People from Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia would drive the camels down Chang'an Jie. But once I had an accident involving two mule carts. At that time Tiananmen Square was the biggest square in the world but it had no traffic lights. Two people in front of me went into this mule cart as these mules were all black and then I did too. I walked up to the mule and gave it a good kick. I had to write a self-criticism for that.”

Liu undoubtedly has courage. And surely a man who has studied politics, learnt photography from the best, won awards for his work, and edited a huge tome on his country’s photographic legacy has intellect. So what does it feel like to be a hero? “It's nice to be recognised for an achievement. In media, it's great to be able to create something for the masses, a book, a photo, or a story, and hopefully it’s a story people want to listen to.” We’re all ears. Tom Pattinson/Jessica Morris