A Cultural Revolutionary

He played Pu Yi’s jailer in last year’s Oscar-winning movie “The Last Emperor,” the jailer who saved the life of the emperor after he had slashed his wrists. And when at the movie’s end he was seen wearing a dunce cap, being led down the street and humiliated by the hated Red Guards, it was not so far removed from his own life.

He brought Arthur Miller and “Death of a Salesman” to China, translated the play into Chinese, and did the lead role of Willy Loman. His other important role, from his own perspective, was as Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan in the NBC miniseries “Marco Polo.”

He cut the ribbon several months ago at the Beijing Art Gallery with its startling (for China) exhibition of nude art. “I feel rather strongly--not as the vice minister of culture but, as a man, as an artist, that the art of the nude should be introduced to China, that we should get rid of these puritanical, medieval ideas about the body. . . .”

But he stayed away from a later avant-garde exhibit because, Ying Ruocheng explained, “I think it’s going a bit too far, (with artists) snapping condoms all over the place. We didn’t ban it. We had to stop it twice. . . .” Once it was stopped when an artist shot her own painting, another when there was a bomb threat by those who wanted the exhibit closed, but it reopened anyway, Ying said.

Ying is one of four vice ministers of culture in China, whose responsibility involves art galleries (but not museums) and the performing arts--everything from theater and opera to acrobatic troupes and puppet shows. He has come to the United States, first to Los Angeles and on to New York next week, to sign

the Joffrey Ballet as the opening act of the second China Arts Festival in September.

This year’s festival, with the Bolshoi Ballet and other companies from 10 nations, marks the 40th anniversary of the People’s Republic, which, on the cultural front, at least, appears to have come a long way from the time when the nation was disparagingly tagged Red China.

“We were madly interested in ballet because it’s something new and very popular in China,” said Ying at the Sheraton Grande Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. “We had our ballet born in the 1950s, but it was on the Russian model. We were cut off from the rest of the world.”

With his fluent and often colloquial English, his navy blazer, charcoal slacks and conservative-striped tie, Ying might have passed for an American businessman or a professor of theater, which he had been in 1982 at the University of Missouri. While he spoke, a representative of the Chinese consulate taped the conversation.

“The only ballet we knew,” Ying said, “was either Russian or revolutionary--in the sense of the ‘Red Detachment of Women,’ that kind of thing. . . . Technically they were very good but there certainly was no individuality, no personal touch, and the theme was very limited.

“Only in the last 10 years,” Ying said, noting the departure from the days of China’s autocratic Cultural Revolution, “have we come in touch with another world of ballet, modern ballet, ballet that does not have its roots in a 19th-Century point of view, and it’s very exciting.”

The Bolshoi Ballet will perform at the arts festival, marking the first time the Soviet Union has sent a performing-arts group to China in “God knows how many years” and “playing, of course, still ‘Swan Lake.’ It’s all very good, of course, the best in the world, but we felt that perhaps America could provide a breath of fresh air.”

For the Joffrey’s artistic director, Gerald Arpino, the Ministry of Culture’s invitation is “a double honor. We are representing the United States, and we are opening the festival.” The company will perform its ballet “Trinity.”

Sandwiching hour-apiece press interviews into a tight schedule, the robust 59-year-old vice minister--who makes no bones about the fact that acting is more “fun,” despite the Volkswagen and official banquets that come with the government job--provided a window on the arts in China.

He also talked about freedom and censorship, which he knows all too well, having spent several years with his late wife, actress Wu Shiliang, in a “re-education” camp during the Cultural Revolution. “But that was much better than the ‘struggle meetings’,” he said. “You’re singled out at a mass meetings, and everybody would start swearing at you, and sometimes we were told to bow down . . . Red Guards pulling your arm saying, ‘Kneel,’ and then I say I have nothing to confess and they say, ‘Confess.’ ”

Speaking about the explosion of television viewing over the last decade in his country of 1.1 billion people where there are now 600 million viewers--”in the cities now 90% are in possession of a TV set; in the countryside at least 50%”--Ying seemed pleased and disappointed at once. Until television, he said, probably 80% never had a chance to see any kind of cultural performance.

Still, going to the theater has dropped off, Ying lamented, among those who were able to go. China has transportation problems, and by the time theater ends “you’ve missed your bus. It’s much more comfortable to sit at home with a glass of beer in front of TV.”

He calls TV watching a “fever.”

Ying, who has been vice minister for nearly three years, scoffs at the notion that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev invented glasnost , or openness, or perestroika , or restructuring, in communist countries. “Gorbachev is such a good publicist,” he said. “We started this long before he did, more than 10 years ago. (Senior leader) Deng Xiaoping had this idea first. . . . The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, but it took us a couple of years to sort of recover.”

Now, Ying said, there is so much to do: “We are restructuring our performing arts groups as a whole. The basic aim is to give them much more autonomy, freedom in the choice of what they put on. Autonomy in the handling of their money, in the hiring and firing of their members, but this is a job that has to be done very carefully, very circumspectly. We’ve made some headway, important headway.

“This is linked to the whole social structure of China, the idea of what we call the ‘iron rice bowl’ which means in practice that when you join a group you’re there for life. Your pay is very low”--on average, he said, about $60 a month--”but you get get so many benefits that you don’t want to leave. You pay the equivalent of $3 a month for your apartment, you have your medical care free, retirement is guaranteed, so if you fire someone you have to put them somewhere where they can enjoy the benefits.

“And that’s not easy because the whole society is being restructured and factories are doing the same,” he said. One way it’s being handled is through earlier retirement. Another way is to allow performing-arts groups “to run their own little enterprises”--a canteen, a bookshop, a wig production shop--”and we could take care of quite a number of people that way.”

Ying maintained that “each individual company is free to choose whatever it wants to do, as far as content is concerned. As for artistic quality that’s in the hands of the critics. The government should be the government. It should not interfere in either the content or form of art.”

But when asked where the arts in China are not achieving full cultural freedom, Ying said: “I don’t think one would ever reach that goal. There are so many restrictions on freedom. It’s not only the government. The government may remove all the restrictions but there still are lifetime habits, conservative views, and sometimes maybe the fault is even with the artist that his stuff isn’t good enough. . . .

“With our traditional forms of art, there is also audience resistance. Someone who loves the Peking Opera for instance, when he sees any changes is angry. He thinks it should be preserved, museum pieces. A lot of Japanese Kabuki is that way, but I met a great Kabuki actor (who) has the courage to strike new paths.”

Asked about recent reports of film censorship in China, Ying, while suggesting the reports are “exaggerated,” said that the “film bureau is of course rather careful about films, much more so than on stage. Because stage performances as a rule reach limited numbers of people, and because film simultaneously could become a very powerful thing. I think some form of censorship will always exist whether it’s government or social.”

A line from the end of a popular 1987 movie “A Small Town Called Hibiscus” in which a madman prophesied that there will be a Cultural Revolution every seven years or so, was cut, although the madman scene was retained. “This was meant as a sarcastic remark quoting Mao. Out of respect for Mao,” Ying said, the cut was made. “There are still people who feel that in order not to upset the apple cart, it’s important that Mao’s image be kept as little tarnished as possible.

“The apple cart,” explained Ying, “is what we call stability.”

Still Ying, as an actor and now for nearly three years as a vice minister, is doing his part to let the outside world in. He brought in “Death of a Salesman” in 1983 because of its theme of “the generation gap and the shattering of a dream. And that’s what a lot of people were going through. The younger generation was beginning to defy the values of the older one, and the older one faced with the total fiasco of the Cultural Revolution was trying to cling to the old idea and force it on to the next generation.”

“Amadeus,” which Ying directed in China, was brought in in 1986 because the play “deals with mediocrity against talent, and it is a theme which is red-hot in China. . . . That kind of mediocrity encouraged mediocrity, and mediocrity once in power will go on to suppress talent. And that’s a situation which occurs very widely in China.” He laughed. “Most people will feel they are Mozarts of course. We have Salieris in our midst.”

And he recently helped arrange for Charlton Heston to direct “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial,” which Ying translated. “It’s still running to packed houses. China is trying very, very hard to legalize our system--China does not have a tradition of legality--so people are fascinated by the courtroom scenes of what a prosecutor could and could not do. . . . And the character of Queeg. He rings a bell anywhere in the world, I think. We have enough Queegs.”