Ma Jisen.
Kitty, don't look.
Dictators: Harris in foreground; Hitler, Hussein,
Pol Pot, et al in background.
The next day, November 26, I interviewed Ma Jisen in the morning and Mr. Gao in the afternoon. Ms. Ma was an unexpected bonus on this trip. She had hosted the first interview with Mr. Wang and had translated for us, but has lived an extraordinary life in her own right and is now writing about it. Her late husband Ran Longbo is the author of Zhou Enlai: A Political Life.
Ms. Ma worked in the Western European Department of the Chinese Foreign Service during the Cultural Revolution and had recently written the first book ever written by someone inside that agency, which was thrown into such chaos during the period.
Ms. Ma is a true intellectual and her book, The Foreign Ministry During the Cultural Revolution is an important work. Crucially, it corrects much of what has been written elsewhere about the Foreign Ministry at the time. With the same generosity extended to me by everyone that I met in Beijing, Ms. Ma gave me the only English copy of the book that she had. Unfortunately I only had time to skim it before my interview with her.
With the diplomat’s caution, Ms. Ma declined to have the interview tape-recorded, stating tactfully that she did not find it “necessary.” I had noticed some interesting things in Ms. Ma’s book and we briefly talked about them. However it was not until I got back home and read the book that I had a chance to follow-up in more depth. Fortunately for me, Ms. Ma and I have continued our conversation via email. That conversation is ongoing and this account will be supplemented at a later time.
Ma’s book touches on the issue of how the Cultural Revolution affected the moral system of the Chinese people. For example, she wrote that Mao’s various political campaigns,
…had carried with them the reversal of what many believed to be right or wrong. (16)
From the very start of the Cultural Revolution, ideas of right and wrong were turned upside down. (405)
These statements are very important to a western trained lawyer because “right and wrong” are legal terms of art that go to the very heart of criminal law and individual responsibility. In my conversations with Ms. Ma I am trying to determine if the meaning that she attributes to these terms has any significance to international legal principles.
A person cannot be held responsible for any crime, even murder, if he did not know the difference between right and wrong. For example, a child who picks up a loaded firearm thinking it a toy cannot be prosecuted for murder if he shoots his playmate. The example illustrates the rare class of cases to which it applies. If the mind is disarranged in whatever way, through trauma, chemical imbalance, or external forces, the effect must be so profound as to obliterate the most fundamental distinction that we are taught as human beings, that it is wrong to hurt someone.
Frederich Nietzsche once wrote “Madness is the exception in individuals and the rule in groups.” However, Nietzsche was no lawyer (he was mad, though). The madness of mob behavior is not the madness that excuses criminal behavior. It seems to me that the madness of Red August was the madness of the mob, not legal madness. But I wasn’t there. It was Mao Zedong’s intent to redefine right and wrong. If Mao succeeded in affecting a “reversal of what many believed to be right or wrong,” if Ms. Ma’s words are true in the legal sense, then those affected could not be held responsible for their crimes.
We took a cab from Ms. Ma’s flat to Renmin University where we picked up Kitty. Of course, I had told the cab driver just to take us to the university without specifying what part of the campus. I called Kitty when we arrived. Of course (because of me), we had gotten dropped off at the precise point the furthest away from where Kitty was as possible. I felt horribly and told Kitty on the phone that we would walk to where she was. She of course said, no, no she would come to us. I was cranky that morning for some reason and already feeling guilty and while on the phone a campus policeman right in front of me decided to test his car siren. Although I am a law enforcement official and work with police officers daily I have this need to buck authority. At inopportune times. The police siren sent my temper from 0-60 mph in one second. Furious, I lowered my cell phone down to my side. I took two...slow...steps toward the policeman, caught his eye, and glared in open-mouthed rage.
Now, in America what would have happened next is the policeman, reading me correctly, would have walked toward me quickly and menacingly, and would have shouted "WHAT THE F!@# ARE YOU LOOKING AT!" He would have pushed me or even just touched me. We then would have gotten into a fight, I would have taken the silver medal to his nightstick and gotten hauled away to jail.
The Chinese police officer turned off his siren. And I felt more guilty.
Carmen had walked away in Latin fury at me, cursing in Spanish, which like Chinese I also do not understand. I apologized to her and she began speaking in English again.
It was a blustery day and in the 40's Fahrenheit. I had on a sports jacket and slacks and was comfortable. However Carmen's comfortable temperature range is no lower than 72 and no higher than 75. She was dressed as for the Arctic.
Kitty came walking around the corner of a building to meet us, her eyes watering from the wind. She is such a waif that I feared she might be blown away.
We drove to 798, the art district on the outskirts of Beijing. Kitty knocked on the door to the Gao Brothers studio and Mr. Gao opened it. His, and his brothers, work started right inside the door. When I looked at the first piece I said, as in awe, “Wow,” but what I thought was “Holy Shit!” I thought we were going to be arrested. To the right of the door was a white life-size statue of Mao pointing a rifle with fixed bayonet right at me. Further inside were a number of busts of Mao, with busts, women’s breasts. Mao’s face was rendered in malevolent madness.
Were the state art police on lunch break? Might they come back to work soon? It was the only time on the trip that I felt security-conscious. I had never expected to see attacks like this on Mao in Beijing. I had known that the art police had raided a Gao Brothers exhibition at 798 the previous year and confiscated some art, one of them the moving “Swimming Mao.” What Mr. Gao had on display inside his studio was much more hard-hitting than “Swimming Mao.”
I asked Mr. Gao, “The police don’t confiscate your work?” He replied that he kept it in his studio and didn’t exhibit it publicly. That was not a direct answer to the question. People don’t grow marijuana in their backyards in the U.S. either. They grow it inside their houses in hydroponic labs. So, the police get a search warrant, break down the door, seize the plants, and arrest the occupants.
There was a blue sculpture of a woman with her legs spread open, her genitalia realistically depicted. I think Mao’s face had been substituted for the woman’s but I glanced away. I wanted to cover Kitty’s eyes with my hands.
I have seen art like this in exhibitions in America many times (just substitute George Bush’s face for Mao’s) but graphic nudity does make me a little uncomfortable in the presence of women and I was differently discomfited that I was in the presence of this graphic nudity with Mao Zedong’s face superimposed in the damn People’s Republic of China!
There was one painting that I particularly liked. It was a group of people. On the face of each person was superimposed that of a notorious dictator. Mr. Gao was impressed that I recognized Pol Pot.
My skittishness at being jet-planed subsided, as did my concern for Kitty’s sensibilities and we sat on a couch and I began to interview Mr. Gao. I asked him The Question. He replied that he wants to “de-idolize” Mao. I asked him why he portrayed Mao with female anatomy. He said that Mao called himself the mother of the country so he wanted to give him the equipment for the role.
I then began asking about individual responsibility.
I fear that I was rude to Mr. Gao. I had been interviewing people for several days getting similar answers to questions or similar quizzical looks, I hadn't had time for detached contemplation, I was cranky and I think I let my impatience show with Mr. Gao. I was more blunt in asking him questions than I had been with others but I think I was too prosecutorial, I think I made him feel cross-examined and besieged. In the photographs taken during the session his arms are folded, a classic sign of defensiveness.
I started by making a statement, as the point seemed too obvious to pose as a question:
“You hold Mao responsible for the crimes committed during his time.”
“Yes.”
“Do you hold anyone else responsible?”
(Quizzical look)
“Did you personally suffer during the Cultural Revolution?”
“Yes, my father was kidnapped and killed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. What about the person who actually, physically laid hands on your father, does he, in your opinion, have any responsibility?”
“The communists caused him to do it.”
I then gave the example of Adolph Eichmann to illustrate the point that underlings have responsibility too but Kitty didn’t know who Eichmann was and I had to explain and when Kitty re-asked the question Mr. Gao seemed not to understand and didn’t answer and I got impatient.
So I switched from inquiring about the personal responsibility of perpetrators to that of onlookers. I told him about Mr. Wang watching Bian walking off to her death. It was an unhappy switch because the last time I talked about it I had huffed in typical American male fashion and I was in an even less understanding frame of mind now.
He replied that the communists had caused that non-intervention mindset too.
“Let’s say that you are about to attack Kitty (No, that's insulting)…Let’s say that a person is about to attack Kitty (This made Kitty feel uncomfortable and she laughed nervously). I see the person grab her; I hear her scream. I’m going to come to her defense! Do you think that people should defend innocent people from being harmed?”
“Yes.”
“Was it ever important to you or your brother to find out who had physically laid hands on your father?”
“We found him.”
“You did? How did you find him?”
“We asked around and with our contacts we found out the man’s name. He still lived in our neighborhood.”
“What did you do?”
“We went up to his house and knocked on his door. As soon as he saw our faces he knew, and he started shaking with fear.”
I was very impressed with this and softened my tone. I told Mr. Gao that I wasn’t making the case for vigilante justice but that I was glad that he had gotten the satisfaction of identifying the man and seeing him scared.
“We didn’t harm him. We thought that living with what he had done and knowing that we knew was punishment enough.”
I told him that that was a kind of justice and I was trying to do justice for Mr. Wang. I immediately felt that that was an incorrect statement but I didn’t know why at first. When I thought about it, I realized: Mr. Wang had never asked me to do justice for him; he had never even told me that he wanted the kind of justice that I was talking about—where the perpetrators in Bian’s murder are identified—from anyone.
“They don’t care about it. If they don’t care about it, why do you?”
