Taiwan Today

Years welled up in the eyes of hundreds of persons attending a recital at the Taipei City Hall the evening of April 8. Tears also coursed down the cheeks of the stocky violinist who stood on the stage and of the diminutive accompanist who sat at the grand piano. After nearly two decades of submission to thought control and degrading months of persecution by the Red Guards, China's greatest living violinist­-composer had come home to the one province of his country where freedom still reigns, where an artist can express himself in creation and performance without interference from government or from those who disagree with him artistically or ideologically. The ac­companist was his wife, a ranking pianist in her own right. The occasion was the first recital of Ma Sitson since he escaped from the Chinese Communist-occupied mainland in December of 1966. Though he had reached the United States soon afterward and is living there, he had saved this moving moment of musical homecoming for his countrymen.

Ma played three of his own compositions: the evocative Mongolian Suite and two pieces based on Chinese folk songs. Then, as a musician of interna­tional status, he turned to the literature of the West­ - to Schubert and Chopin, to Debussy and Chopin. For two nights (a second recital was given April 9) the City Hall was sold out and the aisles were jammed with standees. It mattered not that the ticket prices reached a US$5 top that set a record for Taipei. People queued up at dawn to buyout the house in an hour. The ovation Ma received was for his courage in cutting loose his chains as well as for his excellent musician­ship.

The Mas subsequently went south for recitals at Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung.· Everywhere the story was the same. The free Chinese of Taiwan want­ed to see an artist good enough to have won the respect of the West, and perhaps more than that, a man whose creative integrity led him to renounce Chinese Com­munism as a regime that "betrayed even its slaves". This sentiment of the people must have been in Ma's heart, too. He refused US$7,000 for a recital in the United States so he could play in Taiwan first and then go to Southeast Asia for recitals in the overseas Chi­nese communities of the Philippines, Thailand and other countries.

Ma celebrated his 55th birthday while in Taiwan. He was born in Canton and studied in Paris from 1925 to 1931. Later he was a teacher of violin at the Cen­tral University in Nanking and began his distinguished career in composition there. He married Wang Mu-li in 1935. When the Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937, they went to Hongkong. Both their children were born in the colony - a daughter, Jui-hsueh, 23, who has written the story of their escape for publication this year, and a son, Ju-lung, 20, a violinist who hopes to study architecture. The Mas made their living by teaching and playing during the HongJeong years.

He remembers well the premiere of his First Symphony. It was in Taipei and the year was 1946, just after the defeat of the Japanese and the return of the island province to the Republic of China. This was a time when the forces of the Nationalist Government and the Communists were beginning their mortal combat on the mainland. The years just after 1945 were difficult for sensitive and creative geniuses. Ma Sitson couldn't find his place in China and went back to Hongkong in 1948. In 1949 he was deceived by the Communists and walked into the slavery that was to be his lot for 17 years.

It was April when he went to Peiping, hoping to participate in the "rebuilding of China". Even before reaching the Communist capital, he had a foretaste of what was to come. In Tientsin he was met by an intellectual who had returned from Britain to Yenan and given himself to Communism. Ma has written of this experience: "When we saw him he was sickly and pale, and his face was entirely devoid of expression. He showed no trace of spirit or enthusiasm but accomplished his duties mechanically, as if he had under­gone great hardships. I had no idea what to think about a Communistic society, so I asked him. 'You in Hongkong do not understand many things,' he replied. 'This new society is not simple. It will take time to understand it.' His words were borne out. And I later saw his expressionless look on many other faces."

Ma was attached to an Art Work Team and quickly began to learn about Communism's incredible inefficiency. Only in such an environment could credence be placed in the absurdity of Mao's thought. Meetings never started on time - and sometimes the delay was as long as two hours. Other members told him that things had been worse in Yenan because no one had a clock. Painters and artists had no time left to create; they were too busy waiting for meetings to start­ - meetings that were devoted to idle discussions of pro­jects that might or might not be undertaken in the months to come.

Ma had three face-to-face contacts with Mao Tse­-tung. The first was in Chungking in 1945, when Mao supposedly was negotiating rapprochement between the Communists and the Kuomintang. When the violinist asked Mao about the role of art, Mao said it must please people. Ma objected that great art is often not recognized as such at first. Mao had no answer. In 1949 Ma was a member of a committee considering designs for the Communist flag. Mao made the final choice and then entertained committee members at dinner. The third occasion was in 1956 after a music festival in Peiping. Most of the selections heard had a Western flavor. Mao observed that Chinese and Western music were different. He bade those who were competent in Western music to analyze and improve Chinese music so as to create a wholly new sound. Ma summed up his contacts with the remark that Mao did not seem very knowledgeable about music.

Ma said the Communists quickly forgot their idea of promoting arts that the people wanted. They de­cided that the people should have what was "good for them"; this was then reinterpreted to mean that all art should serve the Chinese Communist Party. Ma had always found that Gounod's Ave Maria was pop­ular with Chinese audiences. The Communists declared it was "poisonous" and he could no longer play it.

Ma became president of the Central Music Academy when it was established in August of 1950 but quickly found out he was not the boss. Control was in the hands of Lu Chi, who had been at Yenan and had written some war songs and a treatise on the politics of art. Never a member of the Communist Party, Ma had nothing to say about admissions or much of anything else. He founds that ability had little to do with whether a student was accepted. What counted was the prospective musician's political reli­ability. As for study, political meetings were more important than any subject in the curriculum. Ma at first blamed Lu Chi but gradually came to understand that this was the way the Communists wanted the school run.

His real disillusionment began in 1951 during the first of many cultural rectification campaigns. The objective was to put the intellectuals in their place and challenge the right of anyone to think for himself. Classes were dismissed. Speeches by Mao and others were read in groups of 30 to 40. After two weeks of this an assembly was held for the leveling of criticisms and the making of suggestions. Ma found that those under fire were the non-party people like himself. He was charged with trying to turn the academy into a capitalist institution; his music was assailed as capitalist-inspired. As a gesture of reform, he wrote and read a gentle self-criticism apologizing for his lack of understanding and pledging improvement. Ma was lucky. His self-denigration was accepted the first time. Some other doubters of the Communist way had to try over and over.

What with the various struggles under way at this time, college students learned little. About half their classroom and study time was spent on Communist Party projects of one kind or another. Ma thought it was wrong to graduate young people who had learned nothing more than the parroting of slogans. His senti­ments apparently were shared by many others. But to have spoken out would have been dangerous. There were secret members of the Communist Party with ears attuned for the disloyalty of the unwary. Ma trusted his wife and children but knew others who could not. If children were "progressive", their elders had to keep quiet or risk criticism sessions or worse. Families often ate in complete silent.

Ma survived one rectification after another by keeping his mouth shut and attending to his music. When Mao launched the "Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend" movement, Ma was suspicious. He did not join other intellectuals in damming the regime, the Communist Party and the bureaucracy. Some critics complained that intellectuals were given positions without authority. When Ma was called upon for his views, he cautiously observed that "position without power" was all right with him because it left more time for music. Newspapers soon published a new version of Mao's "bloom and contend" speech and intellectuals began to vanish into the labor camp at Pei-ta-huang. Many never re­turned.

In this era before the great schism with Moscow, it was dangerous even to challenge anything Russian. One Chinese horticulturist argued that good seed was the main factor in improving fruit. This placed him in opposition to the Russian agronomist Lysenko, who maintained that environment was everything and that acquired characteristics could be inherit­ed. The Chinese was accused of being a rightist and mainland fruit production suffered a setback. The superintendent of a Nanking school, a friend of Ma, was imprisoned for a year because he suggested that cotton prints imported from Russia were unattractive. After his pardon, the provincial public security depart­ment had difficulty finding where he had been incar­cerated.

Economically, Ma Sitson was well off. He had his salary from the academy and a comfortable house. His administrative duties as president of the school were nonexistent. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was free to compose, give private lessons and travel in the mainland and abroad to give recitals. He spent two to three months a year on tour, including trips to Russia and Eastern Europe. With the coming of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, intellectuals were supposed to produce miracles of creativity while the peasants were making magic steel in backyard furnaces. One composer promised a symphony a month, another an opera every four months and a third 500 songs a year: Ma merely said he would finish his Second Symphony and did. That was more than most of the others produced.

Despite their comparatively good life, the Mas suffered from dietary deficiencies during the period of food shortage that accompanied the enforcement of the commune system at the close of the 1950s. They took their children along on recital tours because there was more food at the hotels. Cabbage was the staple of Peiping homes and dormitories. Some of the students went to the parks at night to strip leaves from the trees. Malnutrition brought fatigue and drowsiness. Ma's fingers became thick and clumsy with edema and he had trouble playing. His wife was afflicted and recovered only recently.

All creativity was being slowly but surely choked to death in the straitjacket of Mao's thought. The works of Lao She, a novelist and playwright who wrote of the people, were banned. Ma heard that Lao died either from a beating administered by Red Guards or as a suicide by drowning. To find the correct ideologi­cal line became impossible. After the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" began in 1966, the only movie not banned was one showing Mao receiving the Red Guards. Ma's performances were proscribed. Music had to be "national, for the masses and revolutionary". That was the end for Western music. Ma stayed home to compose. Occasionally he wrote a "revolutionary song" to keep the authorities quiet but most of the time he worked on serious compositions to be played in times to come. The price of such independence was high. Even before the coming of the Red Guard, he was isolated from friends and acquaintances. He was so "backward" that he had to take his children out of school and their friends could visit them only in secret.

Ma has written that the early years of Commu­nist rule were mild compared with the "violence, terror, cruelty, blindness and insanity" of the "cultural revolu­tion" which "has brought about the extermination of (Red) China's intellectuals". It was in May of 1966 that the violinist-composer first heard of the movement that was to give rise to the Red Guard and so many other monstrosities. One of his students came to tell him there would be no more lessons. The student was working in office of the regime and had been criticized for his bourgeois thought and way of life.

Ma Sitson had seen the new oppression coming. For months historians, writers and moviemakers had been denounced for dwelling on the past "in order to criticize the present". Television was virtually turned over to repetitious exposure of the intellectuals "follow­ing the capitalist road". Having gone through so many other rectifications, Ma wasn't afraid for himself. He hadn't written anything - critical or uncritical. Then he heard that he had been attacked in one of the big-­character posters that figured so prominently in the early days of the "cultural revolution". After discus­sion with his family and a friend, he decided to write out his own big-character endorsement of the "cultural revolution" and willingness to reform. He took his poster to the academy.

The Red Guards had not yet been born. But their predecessors existed in the form of "revolutionary teachers and students" who were already disrupting school administration. Chao Feng, a successor to Lu Chi as the party hack actually directing the school, would not let Ma put up the poster. Chao was him­self under fire and apparently hoped to hide behind Ma. It was too late. The next day Chao was de­nounced. An army officer who knew nothing of music was placed in charge. Then the officer was ousted for daring to call the police to break up a fight between two groups of rival students. Anarchy ensued, al­though a team from the "Ministry of Culture" was nominally in charge. Ma was allowed to put up his poster and had opportunity to read those that criticized him for composing bourgeois music and living in a fairyland world of car, cook, fancy chicken coop and many cats. Ma actually had one cat; the Red Guards killed it.

As he was leaving for home, the students of a high school affiliated with the academy accosted him and demanded to know why he made an elegy to a Communist hero so sad. They berated him for being a disloyal follower of their paragon. A few days later, Ma was called to the school. He asked to have his car sent and was told to take a bus. Waiting for him was a mob of several hundred screaming teen-agers. He was subjected to a mass criticism session that included accusations of bourgeois sympathies. He took the abuse silently. There was nothing else to do.

Together with 15 other professors and administrators and Chao Feng, the vice president, Ma was sent to the Socialist Institute. Once this had been a univer­sity for training Communist cadres in Marxist philosophy. Now it had become a concentration camp for the reformation of intellectuals. The 500 there for reform included musicians, artists, writers, actors, directors, teachers and officials and administrators concerned with culture. For 50 days he read propaganda, attended endless discussion meetings and wrote big-character posters criticizing himself and others.

The fall of Chou Yang, the deputy director of the Department of Culture and Propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, occurred during this period. Chou had played a part in many purges and had laid down rulings in many cultural matters, including the stipulation of what music could be played. Most 20th century composers were continuously ban­ned. Debussy and Ravel were permissible during a brief period in 1962. Such classical composers as Beethoven, Brahams and Schubert were acceptable until the general ban on Western music in 1963. Chou Yang was supposed to have been an exemplar of the thought of Mao Tse-tung. Yet his successor called him "the No.1 demon in the Kingdom of Hell".

To think up something new for the big-character posters became more and more difficult. Ma got off lightly. The worst that was said about him came from his driver, who complained that he was not permitted to spit or cough or talk in a loud voice and he had to work so hard he became ill. A former cook claimed that Ma's daughter had sent him out in the rain after ice cream and that he caught the grippe and had to go to a hospital.

As the Red Guard began to take shape, attacks grew more violent. Struggle meetings against Chao Feng, the vice president, became the Guards' principal activity at the Music Academy. Chao was dragged to the school for sessions of as long as eight hours. When he tried to confess his sins, he was shouted down and called obscene names. He was accused of plotting with the British in Hongkong, of abusing workers and of stealing furniture from the school, even of faking a picture showing him with Mao.

On August 9, the Music Academy leaders were taken to the school in a truck. Students, workers, soldiers, even children were waiting to abuse them. Ma was pushed off the truck and a bucket of paste dumped over his head. Posters were stuck all over his body and a dunce cap labeled "Cow Demon" rammed down upon his ears. Signs hung around his neck proclaimed him to be an "Agent of the Bourgeois" and "Vampire". Each of the denigrated was given a cop­per basin and a stick to beat on it. Chao Feng was labeled the "Boss of the Black Gang" and decked out in a heavy sheepskin despite weather of 100°.

"Our assailants acted as if they had gone crazy," Ma has written. People hit and spat upon the victims as they were herded across the campus to the audi­torium and compelled to stand on the stage for vilification. Ma was in the front row with the "Black Gang". Among the "Demons" in the second row was Liu Shih­-k'un, runner up to Van Cliburn in the 1958 Moscow piano competition. Liu's wrists later were twisted so viciously that he could no longer play.

On that first day, the former school leaders were kept on public display for several hours. Later they were taken to some storage sheds at the back of the campus. Ma's room was barely bigger than his bed. The windows on one wall assured a complete lack of privacy. He was an animal in a zoo. A sign on the building proclaimed "Nests of Devils and Demons".

Then the thought reform began. Up at 6, they studied Mao's works or other Communist writings. From 8 to 12 they were assigned to cleaning latrines, chopping firewood and other menial tasks. During the afternoon they wrote self-denunciatory slogans and compositions. Red Guards might call them out at any hour of the day or night for sessions of abuse and beatings. Ma was compelled to crawl on his hands and knees. His room was torn up several times. He was summoned in the middle of the night and whipped with his belt while a girl Red Guard spat in his face.

The Red Guard frenzy was at its height in Peiping during late August of 1967. It was much worse at some other schools. Students at one high school beat all their teachers to death. A neighbor of the Mas was accused of sending radio messages to Taiwan, dragged from her house and killed in the street. People told of heaps of bodies rotting in mortuaries.

Red Guards went looking for Ma's wife and chil­dren. Mrs. Ma hid in the chicken coop but the teen­agers pulled her out and grabbed the daughter. The son was not at home. Many of the rowdies were former classmates of Miss Ma. The leader had been a student of the cello. He recounted Ma's crimes and then demanded paper, ink and brushes to write it out in big-character posters. These were plastered all over the house while Red Guards outside demanded that the "criminals" be beaten. Before the next dawn, Mrs. Ma and the children dressed themselves in ragged clothes and made their way to another city where they stayed with friends. Ma's son and daughter escaped induction into the Red Guard only because they had dropped out of school. As the movement developed, it became dangerous to remain aloof.

By September, hundreds of thousands of Red Guards were swarming into Peiping from throughout the mainland to "exchange revolutionary experiences". They lived in the schools. "It was a mess," Ma recalls, but one with a blessing in disguise. As the situation be­came anarchical, discipline was relaxed at the academy thought reform mill. At first the "Black Gang and demons" were permitted to go home on Sundays, then Saturday night and Sundays, and finally every night. The interest of the Red Guards was turning from "cul­tural criminals" to political offenders.

Ma went home - but not to the happy house he had known. His family was gone. His books, records and other personal property had been confiscated or destroyed. Part of the house had been taken over by some workers. The rest was occupied by 60 Red Guards, who were spread out like cord wood for sleep­ing. The violinist and composer stayed in his old study. Only two books had been left: The Call of the Wild by Jack London and a volume of Greek mythology. He could not bear to read the Jack London book more than once; the life of the poor dog was too like his own. His wife and daughter came to Peiping to see him but he could not leave the school. The next time his daughter came alone and they met at the home of a friend. Soon afterward, Red Guards sought Mrs. Ma in the central China city and the family had to leave for another refuge near the coast. Jui-hsueh, the daughter, came again in mid-November. She told her father that in the coastal city there was much talk of escape from the mainland. Ma hesitated. It was desperately hazardous. If the escape couldn't be arranged quickly, the Red Guards would surely catch them. If they were apprehended in the act of fleeing­ - as many were - that would be the end. He sought the counsel of a friend and was urged to go.

Jui-hsueh stood in line half the night to get the tickets. Her father cleaned latrines at the school in the morning, then pleaded ill and said he would go to a clinic. Father and daughter collected a few articles that had been hidden for safekeeping - including Ma's violin - and made two bundles tied with rope. His dress was the drab blue of a workman and he wore a gauze mask over his mouth as though he had a cold or was seeking to avoid one. They arrived in the coastal city safely. Mrs. Ma was waiting in a nearby village. For the next several weeks they hid alternately in the city and the village. A friend told them of a former boat captain who hoped to steal a vessel. The boat captain's son wasn't sure there would be room for them, however, and said the price would be US$1,500 each.

Talk of escape was on many lips in the city. Many of those who tried were caught, served their sentences of labor reform, then tried again. As the waiting dragged on, Ma became worried about the increase in Red Guard activity. The village was no longer safe; it was too small. The teen-age "young generals" were fighting among themselves and also against workers. There were atrocities in the streets. Then the friend who had set up the meeting with the boat captain's son decided to discourage the escape. He said that things were improving in Peiping and that the Mas should go back. Recordings of Ma's songs were back on sale in the shops. The composer didn't agree. He was sure a labor camp and months or years of reform were in store if they returned to Peiping.

The family determined to press on to freedom. But how? Jui-hsueh could recall only the street of the contact, not the house, and there were some 200 num­bers. They walked up and down the street as she tried to remember. Could it be this house? Was it that? Knocking on doors at random brought no result. At last Jui-Hsueh remembered one family name. They tried it at a door and were told that the man lived next door. The following afternoon they were back in touch at a meeting in a park. Their places had not been sold to anyone else. Money could wait. The boat captain was a music lover. When he found out his client was Ma Sitson, he was prepared to accept a promise.

Waiting was necessary for the Mas, too. The appointed date for sailing was a week away. The family split up and everybody stayed off the streets to avoid the parading Red Guards. On the appointed night, they took a bus into the outskirts and walked along a narrow road beside the river. They had no baggage. Ma's violin had been sent ahead. Then they saw two people at the side of the road. Supposedly the Mas were to meet the boatman's son and his brother, who would be dressed as hunters looking for birds. The guns and flashlights were to be used in signaling the boat, which would be waiting offshore. The first part of the trip was to be by rowboat. Suspici­ous of the two loiterers, the boatmen's sons motioned the Mas away. There was no choice; it was back into hiding.

Three days later - on a dark and rainy night­ - Ma and his son tried again. Mrs. Ma and Jui-hsueh would go another way. This time a meeting was under way at the boatyard and the captain couldn't get the key. Now time was fast running out. The full moon was nearing and light was the greatest danger. Another failure would mean a possibly fatal wait of at least another two weeks.

It was the last day before the brightness of the full moon. They huddled under a tree along the river as the hours dragged past. When the signal came, they ran as fast as they could over the coastal rise and to the shore. The rowboat beached and 13 people poured into it, enough to weigh down the small boat dangerous­ly. The margin of freeboard was very small. Presently they could hear the soft "putt-putt-putt" of the bigger boat's engine. Then they were scrambling over the side and crowding into the small cabin to get warm.

The cabin couldn't hold everyone and the skipper ordered the Mas and some of the others aft. They lay down together, huddled close together against the cold wind. Ma had been told the boat could outrun any pursuers. It wasn't so. The boat's speed was only a few knots. Chinese Communist checkpoints lay ahead. In such a slow boat that could be fatal. No patrol craft appeared. But as they were passing the last checkpoint, their little craft was suddenly bathed in bright light. A ship had approached to within shouting distance. The captain veered his course hard to starboard and a freighter slipped past. The searchlight flicked out. Now another light sought them from the shore - searching for the small haven of the refugees. The light probed and probed. But the freighter was gone and the coastal watchers gave up. The last checkpoint was passed.

Now the engine roared louder - and so did the waves. They rose higher and washed over the Mas. Perhaps he will write a concerto of the sea some day. He was wet and frightened and cold - but increasingly certain that he and his son had made good their escape. The captain became lost and contact with a boat from the free world was not made. Finally, in desperation, the skipper decided to disembark along a rocky pro­montory and then scuttle the escape craft.

Wet and chilled, Ma and his son and the other refugees stood on free soil - or free rocks to be more accurate - and threw their Mao Tse-tung badges into the sea. They had been saved from Chinese Commu­nism. Whatever might come, it could never be as bad as what they had already gone through.

The Mas were promptly granted asylum in the United States. They lived with Ma's brother, Sihon, an American citizen and concert violinist, in New York early in 1967. Later they moved into an apartment at the northern edge of Washington. Ma has resumed his composing as well as his playing. One of his new symphonic works will have a "Flight to Freedom" theme.

Last October 31 Ma Sitson stood on the stage of the famed Philadelphia Academy of Music to acknowl­edge applause for the free world premiere of his Violin Concerto No.1. The soloist was brother Sihon, playing with the Camden Symphony Orchestra. The conductor was Ling Tung, whose sister is Sihon's wife. The concerto had been composed a quarter century before. Manuscripts of most of Ma's works were lost in the course of the escape from Peiping. The concerto survived because a copy had been sent to violinist Yehudi Menuhin, whose daughter is married to Ma's godson, Fou Ts'ong, a pianist. One reviewer compared the performance of the concerto to Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Svetlana Alliluyeva's memoirs.

Ma, who has judged piano and violin competitions in the Soviet Union and is familiar with musical devel­opments there, says that musicians are not free to de­velop creatively anywhere in the Communist world. "If a composer ignored ideological guidance and created a new style, he would be accused of failing to serve the people," Ma said. "Russian music lacks creative new works. Yet there are many creative talents in Com­munist countries. They are trying to say something new regardless of the authorities, a fact which shows that no tyranny can entirely destroy the creative urge."

Modern trends in Western music are not new to him. As a musical researcher, he was permitted to obtain and listen to new Western recordings. However, Ma's roots of composition are in folk music and the romantic era. He is of the opinion that some ex­treme music of the modern school has made a fetish of novelty. "I don't understand and do not like such music," Ma said. He hopes to draw on themes of the Taiwan aborigine music in some of his future composi­tions. To his mind, the future of Chinese music lies in direct acquaintance with the folklore and songs of the people. "But the composer shouldn't accept them totally. He should absorb them and make them a part of his musical language."

As for music under the Chinese Communists, it is now dead, Ma maintains - "nothing but marches". Anything else must extol Mao, and great music cannot be made that way. "Mao is ambitious," Ma said. "He wants to spread his power and he believes in world revolution. Mao Tse-tung wants to surpass every emperor in Chinese history and build the greatest empire the world has ever known."

Ma concluded a Life magazine article of last July with these words:

Now (Red) China is in a state of paralysis. Her youth cannot disguise their fear because they do not know when they might themselves be named "Cow Demons and Snake Devils". For them time drags on. Today is the same as yesterday: the same songs, the same slogans, the same yelling and swearing. With sadness I recall the lines of my old friend, the poet Ai Ch'ing:

On this mountain there are no trees
In this river no water flows
In this place the people cannot weep.

Ma Sitson was never a Communist Party member, never a Communist. However, he was once impatient with the National Government. Like some other intellectuals, he hoped China could find a short-cut to greater freedom and to economic development and prosperity that would open the way to a new golden age of the arts. He was vice president of the "All-China Union of Musicians", vice chairman of the "All-China Federa­tion of Literary and Art Circles", vice president of the "Sino-German Friendship Association" and of the "Sino-Indonesian Friendship Association" as well as president of the Central Music Academy. Although under Communism he was one of the favored few, his disillusionment was complete long before the excesses of the "cultural revolution" and the beatings of the Red Guards.

More than anti-Communism was involved in Ma's homecoming. He was telling the Communists and the world that the best hope for China's future lies in the people, the government and the cause of the free Chinese of Taiwan. His very presence spoke louder than words. He had come to the only province of China where his music - or any music - may be freely written and freely heard, where the intellectual is respected and given the liberty to write his own definition of art and creativity.