From March 1943, Ma Xiwu headed the Longdong branch of the high court of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region. He went to the villages, investigated on the spot and held hearings there. Mediation, and combining mediation with judgment, was an important principle of his method. In a marriage case from Huachi County in 1943, Feng Peng’er stopped him on the road and made her complaint under a tree.
The case became a story. In 1944 the artist Gu Yuan published a woodcut, Comrade Ma Xiwu Mediates a Lawsuit. A 1945 play based on the case later became the opera Liu Qiao’er, filmed in 1956.