project

In 1968， the CIA（US Central Intelligence Agency） and the BVD（Dutch secret service) officially collaborated on an espionage operation codenamed "Project Mongol", also known as “Project Red Herring". The aim of the operation was to infiltrate high-level Chinese intelligence and to split the CPN( Communist Party of the Netherlands). They set up a fake MLPN (Marxist-Leninist Party) in Amsterdam, headed by a man under the pseudonym of Chris Petersen. This organisation, which claimed to have 600 members in the party but in fact had only 12 BVD intelligence officers, fabricated a series of party membership rolls and publications De Kommunist to gain the trust of the Chinese Embassy in the Netherlands and Beijing, and become 'An Old Friend of the Chinese People'.

His career as a spy began in 1957, when he accepted Khrushchev's invitation to attend the International Youth Congress in Moscow under a secret appointment from the BVD. Before that he had actually been a mathematics teacher.
In 1958 he secretly joined the Dutch Communist Party and was invited to the 10th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Since then, he has been a regular visitor to the Chinese Embassy in The Hague.

As a representative of the communist movement in developed capitalist countries, He established close contacts with the Soviet, Albanian and Chinese governments. His career as a spy involved a total of 25 visits to China, each time receiving revolutionary funds from the Chinese side, which he used to travel various Chinese cities and to take photographic records until the end of the operation in the late 1980s after the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe.

In his memoirs of his life as a spy in China in his later years, He mentioned that, personally, he was not interested in the images of specific political events presented to the BVD, but was more fascinated by the part he kept to himself, which included a great deal of exotic customs, street life and untouched landscapes.

Another interesting detail confirms that while he was watching the revolutionary opera The Red Detachment of Women at the dinner party of China Army Day in 1971, he was joined in the audience by another Socialist ‘comrade’ from his home country, the filmmaker Joris Ivens.

From early experiments around visual technology and the exploration of poetic styles, to the later turn towards a more direct and radical political engagement with real world crises, he has never abandoned the energetic involvement of the body and the eye through the camera, and it is for this reason that he has remained steadfast in his belief that he will always maintain the independence of filming and pursue film that convey and assume the truth of meaning.

As a committed socialist, he has travelled extensively to document workers' and peasants' movements in various war-torn and revolutionary countries, including the Spanish Civil War, the Indonesian independence movement and the Chinese Anti Japanese war, for which he was marginalised by the West and expelled from his own country for forty years.
Yet other critical voices have argued that since the 1930s, his work has largely followed a party line, sometimes defending the right of peoples to self-determination and sometimes suspiciously supporting the official regime. And in 1971 he was about to begin work on one of the most controversial films of his life, How Yukong Moved the Mountains, about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The Art of Describing

Most of what is know about me comes largely from heroes, spies, traitors, strayers...

I believed for a time in the words of the Japanese philosopher Daisaku Ikeda 'Good and evil, like all things in the world, change with the evolution of historical conditions, social characteristics, times and subjective ideas.'

Now that the Iron Curtain of yesteryear is long gone, I feel that the memories that were once proud and strong are weakening and leaving me, which makes me wonder if this view has already taken me into some kind of historical nothingness. Only these images of distant and foreign lands remain to remind me of the existence of the reality and the past.

Is film, as a kind of memory archive, innocent?
Or, perhaps, there never was an archive of innocence.
It is itself a violence that begins with officialdom and power, a usurpation of the future, which it pre-occupies; it recycles the past, the present and the future at the same time.
In the end, it only helped me to form my own time, and it can only do so.

In their later years, they both returned to the pursuit of the wind which they saw as the source of their motherland and the symbol of their lifelong ambitions, but also as a symbol of the final mirage that has been secretly suppressed in the torrent of external reality.

As in the dialogue in 'A Tale of the Wind'

"What is Qi?"
"The mystery of Qi lies in the rhythm of the autumn breeze，One Breath ..... One Inhale"

This answer comes from the concept of Tao Te Ching.

"Heaven and earth are like bellows in a furnace! Void but unyielding, moving but more out"

It means that the destiny of the universe and of the individual is such that no one can escape and find peace from it.