I read the article “Why I escaped from China” published by Ma Sicong, who was used as a counter-textbook, in the first issue of Frost Morning Moon, which was edited by the Hunan Black Front Battle Group in January 1968. Although Ma Sicong’s experience during the Cultural Revolution was not the most tragic, at least he was not killed by his own students or killed himself, even so, the persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution and the fear of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution can be fully felt through this article. I thought that such an article would have been popular on the mainland, but unfortunately, after a search on the Internet, I could not find the original text, but only the introduction of his article and the description of his escape. The author has taken the time to record this article for your reading pleasure. The translation published in Frost and Morning Moon is based on the Russian translation of the July 19, 1967 edition of the Soviet newspaper Literatura, so this article may differ from the original text of Ma Sicong, especially in the names of people and positions. Also, Frosty Morning Moon was reprinted, and there may have been errors in the process of reprinting and printing. However, the author believes that these differences or errors do not affect the authenticity of the whole article.
Why I Escaped from China
The Terrible Truth About the Cultural Revolution
I am a musician. I value peace and tranquility and an environment that is conducive to my work. Besides, I am Chinese, and I love and respect my country and my people. What happened in China is a tragedy. Compared to it, all the unpleasantness that has befallen me personally pales into insignificance. The Cultural Revolution is still going on, and the cruelty, brutality, horror, blindness and madness of this movement is beyond anything that has happened in the past seventeen years, and is actually unprecedented. It led to the annihilation of Chinese intellectuals. Like many others, the events of last summer and fall, which for years played a prominent role in finally (if not always in the hands of) the people, both inside and outside the Party, discouraged me and forced me and my family to become fugitives, “hungry ghosts” wandering the country. The “ghosts of hunger” in the country. If my experience was different in some way from the average person’s, it was only because I managed to escape from China in a way that most people do not.
How It Began
I remember it was a Sunday in May, the day I first heard about the Cultural Revolution. One of my students came to my house without his violin and said he couldn’t come to study with me anymore. He had been criticized for his “bourgeois” way of thinking and living because of the “Cultural Revolution”. He didn’t dare to learn the violin anymore.
The last few months have shown that a new movement is underway. The recent attacks on cinema, on certain historians, denouncing them for “using the past as a metaphor for the present”, are intensified, and every night the radio broadcasts nothing but an endless repetition of such and such “criminals” (many of whom have since committed suicide). There was practically nothing else on the air. However, to be honest, I didn’t feel terrible. A friend who visited me at the time said, “You haven’t written anything, you haven’t said anything incorrect, you have no reason to worry.” My only crime was that as president of the Central Conservatory of Music (sic – translation), I was taking a salary, although I didn’t actually work there.
From 1954 onwards, it became very clear that I, the leader of the school, was nothing more than a purely titular role, so I got rid of all the affairs of the Academy as much as possible. All the powers of the Academy actually belonged to the Vice-President of the Academy, and I also taught violin to several students. I also taught violin to several students, including my son, Hu Long, and sometimes gave concerts in Beijing and other parts of China. After 1963, when European music was completely banned, I had no idea how this new movement was going to work, and no one else could envision what was waiting for us. The situation was tense, but there had been times in the past when it was more tense than that, such as in 1952. I was used to it and had to get used to it. But at the beginning of June, I was informed that there were large posters attacking me at the Conservatory.
A friend said that the best thing for me to do was to be self-critical before going any further. My wife and daughter, Sherya (pronounced Ma Rui Xue), agreed. I felt hesitant, but I had nothing to confess except that I didn’t like it. Finally, my daughter wrote a statement in my name, saying that I was happy to support the Cultural Revolution, and that although I did not specifically admit to any crimes, I was still willing to reform. We bought three sheets of yellow paper and wrote this statement in the form of a large-character poster, and added the heading “My Determination” to it. So I sent this statement to the college.
Frequent Changes and Anarchy
At that time there were no Red Guards, but the self-proclaimed “revolutionary teachers and students” were already causing chaos in the school’s work. A man named Zhao Bambu, the vice-chairman of the Conservatory of Music, used to be the one who actually ruled the Conservatory, but when I took the big-character poster to him, Zhao Bambu did not allow me to hang it. I suspect he intended to use me as a front so as to deflect criticism against him, but whatever his plan was, it didn’t have the desired effect either. He was suspended the next day and was himself attacked in large print, and an officer named Wang, who knew nothing about music, came to replace him. A day later, however, Wang also fell out of favor – he made a mistake by trying to call the police to stop the conflict between the two factions of the “revolutionary students”.
When I was ready to go home, a student from the secondary school asked me to go with him to their school. There, I was surrounded by a group of violent teenagers who began shouting at a musical work I had written. It was a sad song written in memory of a heroic district party secretary, Jiao Yulu. This secretary, who died defending the interests of his rural constituents, will always be a model for Party workers. I did not write this type of work to avoid some unpleasantness. Although it is still true that at that time I had admiration for the dedication of this sad song. But the teenagers shouted wildly: “Why do you write such sad music? You don’t deserve to be an advocate of Jiao Yulu!” Then they made me bring back a roll of large-print posters and asked me to hang them up and read them. I stuffed these large-character posters into the storage room.
After a few days, a call came from the school asking me to go. At the school, I was immediately surrounded by hundreds of broken-mouthed, shouting college students. “Down with bourgeois authority!” At every slogan someone yelled, “Long live Mao Zedong!” One lad shouted; “Long live Ma Si Cong!” But it was the wrong shout, and all the men lunged at him. One man hit me with his book bag, but no one hit. There was nothing else I could do but stand still. It all felt completely unreal and ridiculous to me.
We were rehabilitated
Soon after this incident, seventeen of us were called to the school and notified that we were to be sent for “training”, including several professors and administrative staff of the conservatory, including the vice president of the conservatory, Zhao Bambu, who looked as if he had not slept for several nights.
Many of these people were Party members. We were sent to the Socialist Institute, which used to be a place where Communist Party cadres studied Marxism-Leninism, but later this school became a concentration camp set up by intellectuals and prominent cultural figures.
There you could meet all kinds of people – painters, actors, musicians, film directors, writers, cultural workers, teachers and professors from the Academy of Fine Arts, the Film Academy and other colleges. There were five hundred of us in total, and I lived in a room with one of the most famous violinists in the country.
I spent fifty days in this place – from the middle of June to the beginning of August – and it was dull and tiresome. But no one treated us harshly. We were divided into small groups, read various documents under the supervision of the officers, had discussions, and in our free time wrote big letters to ourselves or to each other, and to the “party authorities”.
One time I heard the extraordinary news that Zhou Yang, the vice minister of the Central Propaganda Department with unlimited power, had collapsed. For many years, he had been our top boss, and he played a major role in many purges. The instructions given to various cultural fields, such as stipulating which foreign musical works are allowed to be played in China, came from there. If you don’t count the very short period of 1962, Debussy and Ravel and most of the twentieth century were banned. Before all European music was banned in 1963, works by classical composers such as Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert could be played.
Zhou Yang was once portrayed as an exponent of Mao’s ideas, but now one of the deputy ministers who replaced him claims to us that “Zhou Yang’s own ideas are stinky, nonsense and incomprehensible”.
He was called “the number one cow and snake god.
The Ministry of Culture sent someone to tell us surprising things about Zhou Yang and his minions. We were told that it seemed that “reactionaries” who had hidden weapons (including cannons) had surrounded the entire Zhongnanhai area where Mao and other leaders lived. We didn’t know much about what was going on, and although we were occasionally allowed to go home for Sunday, on one occasion I saw the words “Down with xxxx” written in large letters on the wall of our own house.
One evening, some trucks from various schools and troops came to the college. On one of the trucks were four Chinese characters “Gangster Special”. It was August 9, and as soon as we entered the gate, we saw a huge crowd. We were pushed out of the truck and before my feet could hit the ground, someone poured a bucket of paste on my head and others put big posters on my clothes and a tall hat made of paper with the words: “Cow devils and snake gods”. I had a big sign put around my neck that said “Marcion – agent of the bourgeois opposition”, and then a sign that said “Vampire “. Later they gave us each a basin – a “death knell” – and a stick with which we had to knock the basin. On Zhao Bambu’s high hat was written “gangster” and he was given a thick sheepskin coat. The weather was very hot, a real August day in Beijing – no lower than 38 degrees.
It was a barbaric scene, the people attacking us were like madmen, and we were led through the entire conservatory to the noise of the crowd shouting all sorts of slogans, with people pushing and spitting on us all along the way. I recognized several of my students whose faces had become deformed. Finally, they forced us to bow our heads, lined up in two rows on the steps of a house, and started hurling insults, with the “gangsters” who were considered the worst “offenders” standing in the first row, and the smaller “bullies and snakes “stood at the back. In the back row stood the pianist Liu Shikun, a competitor of Cribbs in the 1958 Moscow competition, who later had his hand broken and could no longer play.
The guards’ rampage
Then we were taken to a row of short houses at the back of the school, which used to be a warehouse for pianos. I was led to one of the houses. It was just big enough for a bed. One wall of the room was almost entirely glass. Every person can watch you whenever he wants. What stood out on the wall of my room were the following words: “Down with vampires! and “If you don’t behave, we’ll smash your dog’s head in!”. . A sign hung on the door of what used to be a warehouse: “Den of Bullies, Demons and Snakes.
Every morning we got up at six o’clock to study Mao and newspaper editorials, ate breakfast and then worked from eight o’clock to noon, doing completely meaningless work – building up scattered stones into large piles or moving things from one room to another. Throughout the afternoon and evening we had to write self-criticisms, which were full of such phrases as: “We are the bourgeois black bandits of Cho Bambu” and “We need to be fought against, we need to be reformed”, and we handed these works over every day handed over to our guards.
Every morning and every evening, a chorus had to be sung, and the song was called “The Wild Howl of the Black Bandits” (sic), and it went, “I am a bull-headed monster, I am guilty, I am guilty. I shall submit to the dictatorship of the people, for I am an enemy of the people, I shall be honest, and if I am not honest, smash and smash me.”
The most horrible thing I remember was calling out one by one to torture us. The Red Guards could order us at any time to “bow our heads” and then they forced us to crawl on all fours, and several times they made a scene in my room, throwing away my books, turning over my bed, tearing my sheets, and one of the “Red Guards” grabbed my blanket and threw it on the roof. One of the “Red guards” grabbed my blanket, threw it on the roof, and shouted, “The revolution is innocent, the rebellion is justified!”
Sometimes the “red guards” ordered us to stand facing the wall until he allowed us to turn our faces, but then they completely forgot about us. Or they forced us to stand with our heads down in the ashes of the sun. One night, when I was sleeping in my own room, there came a violent shouting …….
A young man and a girl: “Get up” they ordered to, I leapt up, the young man began to whip me with a belt, while the girl spit on my face. I’m not really suffering, while Zhao Bambu encountered this situation is always beaten on the ground, dripping with blood.
All this happened in the first and third weeks of August, when the Red Guards’ rampage in Beijing reached its climax. In other parts of the city, there were also appalling incidents in which students in one high school literally beat all their teachers to death.
Terrified by this unheard of brutality, my family had to transfer some of my belongings to my friend’s house, including all my unpublished recent works, fourteen large pieces, sell some other items to a small store, and flee Beijing.
The Red Guards’ Nationwide Caucus
My wife and children put on the poor man’s rags and took a bus to a city in central China where I had friends.
Shelia told us that in June there had been a long and endless controversy among the students of the Conservatory of Music, a controversy that was sometimes of a hysterical nature, both in the Conservatory and, I think, in Beijing, where the Red Guards’ ranks called themselves “August 18”, “Dongfang Hong” or “Mao Zedong”. “or “Mao Zedong Thought” movement. In November, the “August 18” movement was attacked by the “Dongfang Hong” and “Mao Zedong Thought” groups because of its “counter-revolutionary” nature. “At the same time, all three organizations considered themselves to be loyal to the Maoists.
When autumn came, the situation changed and thousands of Red Guards came to Beijing from all over China. They lived in the school buildings, and although the streets were still dangerous at times, the situation in the school eased a bit for us, and we were no longer guarded by our doors, nor were we noticed, but were still writing confessions according to the scheduled plan. At the beginning of September, we were allowed to go home for Saturday. Later we were allowed to stay from Saturday evening to Sunday evening. And by November, we were able to go home for the night and to “work” and “study” at school only during the day.
My wife and daughter came to Beijing at the end of September to meet me, but I couldn’t get out of the door, so I couldn’t see them. They arrived on a train full of Red Guards, and they were questioned closely and almost arrested as suspects. When my wife and daughter were in Beijing, they tried to stay with our friends, but no one dared to receive them, and they had to hide in the crowd for a few hours before boarding the train.
Two weeks after this attempt, Celia came to Beijing alone, this time contacting me and meeting at the home of one of our friends who lived in the southern suburbs, far from the city center. We talked quietly in the darkness of a small toilet in the courtyard, while our friend stood at the entrance and gave us a look-see, and we kept talking for hours.
Escaping
In the city where they lived at the time, people often talked about the various ways to escape from China, some on foot, others in small boats – exactly how to get there was less precisely known, but she was sure that we could do that too.
But I wasn’t ready to take that step yet. I couldn’t easily leave to join my family, and in the area where my family lived, the Red Guards had become more active, and they might catch me there. On the other hand, if the escape plan failed, then we would be finished. Throughout the night, I was very nervous and could not sleep. As they say in China, I was “backed into a corner”, and finally I talked to an acquaintance about my idea.
It ended up being “go” – he said, so I agreed. Sheria waited in line for half the night, but finally got a train ticket. I went to school for my morning shift and said, “I’m sick and have to go to the clinic.” Sheria and I packed up the part of the stuff that had been sent for preservation, which included my violin, and then tied it up in two bundles with string, and my new piece had to stay.
[Postscript].
A brief rundown of Marcion’s escape and post-escape events according to online sources.
At the end of 1966, Ma Sicong’s youngest daughter, Ma Ruixue, “sneaked back” to Beijing and told her plans to go to Hong Kong to take refuge from the wind and recuperate, but Ma Sicong refused immediately. Ma Sicong replied: “He has lived an open and honest life and has no shame in the world, so he will not go down this road. After more than two hours of argument, the daughter changed her story and went back to Guangzhou first to rest and recuperate and wait and see what happens. Ma Sicong, who was in a state of extreme physical and mental exhaustion and disappointment, finally agreed. With the financial support of chef Jia Junshan and doctor Ni Jingshan, who sold his bicycle, Ma Sicong went to Guangzhou in disguise.
As his disappearance alerted the public security authorities, Ma was left with two choices: to be caught and returned to Beijing, where his life would be in danger, or to escape disaster by stowing away in Hong Kong. In the early morning of January 19, 1967, Ma Sicong’s family boarded a plane to the United States and embarked on a long and difficult road to exile. On that day, dozens of Chinese and English newspapers in Hong Kong published the headline “Famous Chinese musician Ma Sicong escapes to Hong Kong! “.
In January 1967, Ma Sicong was designated by the Ministry of Public Security as a “traitor and enemy defector”. The Ministry of Public Security’s “Report on the Case of Ma Sicong’s Defection to the Enemy” was approved by Kang Sheng and Xie Fuzhi, and the case of Ma Sicong’s “defection to the enemy” was investigated thoroughly and dozens of people were implicated and imprisoned. Ma Sicong’s second brother, who was living in Shanghai, jumped to his death, and his mother-in-law, niece and cook were persecuted to death one after another.
On April 12, 1967, Ma Sicong published “Why I Wanted to Escape from China” in the United States.
In January 1985, the Ministry of Culture issued a notice of complete rehabilitating Mr. Ma Sicong, former director of the Central Conservatory of Music, and rehabilitated him.
He died on May 20, 1987 in Philadelphia, USA. Mr. Ma Sicong has not set foot on the mainland since he fled the country.
In December 2007, the ashes of Ma Sicong and his wife were buried in the “Jufang Garden” at the foot of Baiyun Mountain.
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