Of Devils & Demons

Revolutionary teachers and students smeared paste all over my body and stuck on pieces of paper with abusive slogans. They forced me to wear a black dunce cap and beat me with their belt buckles. 1 spent 103 days in a dreadful hideout for devils and demons and underwent what is too painful to describe.

So last week did one of Red China's foremost musicians describe the treatment meted out to him by Mao Tse-tung's Red Guards. What made the description more remarkable was that it was made on American soil, in Manhattan, by one of the few escapees from Red China to reach the U.S. He is Ma Ssu-tsung, 54, the president of Red China's Central Academy of Music, the vice president of the Union of Chinese Musicians and a deputy to the National People's Congress.

Ma Ssu-tsung was a venerated musician in China and the composer of some 24 works for the violin, piano and orchestra, including a propagandistic Longing for Home that became the signature tune for the regular Red broadcasts beamed at Taiwan. He was at peace with the Red regime until last June, when he and some 500 other cultural leaders were caught in the net of "thought reform," as part of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Chinese army officers forced Ma and his colleagues to clean toilets and break stones in the morning, study the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and write "confessions" till late at night--an exercise that lasted 50 days. Allowed to return to his music academy in mid-August, he was then set upon by the Red Guards and exposed to the humiliation he described in New York.

Very Fortunate. In December, Ma and his wife and two children, all musicians, somehow managed to flee from China to Hong Kong, where he sought asylum in the U.S. Exactly how Ma rejoined his family and managed to escape remains untold, but he is reported to have reached Hong Kong with other escapees in a small boat. At any rate, ensconced at the Manhattan home of his brother, a violinist who left China before the Communists took over, he allowed that he was "very fortunate. Many prominent writers who could not get away have committed suicide."

In the drive to tear up all roots that bind China to Western culture, many top artists and performers are going through the same hell that Ma did. It was reported that Liu Shih-kun, topflight pianist and runner-up to Van Cliburn at the Moscow Tchaikovsky festival in 1958, had his wrists broken by Red Guards. Hung Hsien-nu, Canton's best-known opera singer, was tried by kangaroo courts, had her hair bobbed, and now works sweeping floors. Chou Hsin-fang, star of the Peking opera, and elderly Author Lao She (known in the West for Rickshaw Boy) have disappeared and are believed to be either dead or toiling in remote labor camps. Mao's China is indeed a land where, as Ma Ssu-tsung put it, "art is a prisoner in shackles."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.