In 2003, the curatorial staff of the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou finished gathering together the first major museum collection ever assembled in China of documentary photographs produced by China's own photographers. Soliciting 100,000 photographs from all over the country, they selected the best 600. Representing a wide spectrum of human subject matter, and taken in the years 1951 through 2003 by 248 photographers, they then became the first Chinese traveling photography exhibition, titled "Humanism in China," with the first exhibition catalogue of its kind.

China Institute organized the American tour of this collection,with a selection of 100 of these photographs. The photographs are of a very high aesthetic order, displaying an extraordinary range of human emotion and activity, urban and rural, public and private. They reflect the radical change China has gone through in the past half century and break through all the stereotypes of life in China that photography itself has sometimes been used to create. The exhibition was organized by the Guangdong Museum of Art and curated by Wang Huangsheng, An Ge, and Hu Wugong. China Institute Gallery, with Jerome Silbergeld, reorganized the traveling exhibition in the United States.