Welcome to Stories of Communism,
the podcast where we review and discuss the firsthand testimony of those who
lived through the horrors of Communism over the past century. This is Erik Seligman, your co-host, along
with Manuel Castaneda, recording from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon.
Today we’re going to discuss the
extraordinary life of Sidney Rittenberg, an Amercian who abandoned his country
to become part of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution in China. He then lived there for almost thirty years—
sixteen of which were spent in solitary confinement, as he fell in and out of
favor with the Party over those three decades.
His autobiography, “The Man Who Stayed Behind”, was published in 1993 to
rave reviews in the U.S. As Mike
Wallace wrote, “It reads like a riveting historical novel. But there’s no fiction here… it’s Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the Long
March, solitary confinement, despair, romance, and redemption. Sidney Rittenberg’s story is a classic.”
Rittenberg’s youthful fascination with Communism is pretty
understandable, given his
Depression-era childhood, when
many in the U.S. questioned whether there was a better way. This was followed by influence from various
radical forces when he attended Stanford University. As he wrote,
“I
had joined the American Communist Party in 1940 while I was in college…it was
the Communists, with their strong posture on free speech and ethnic equality in
America, and their roots in the American
labor movement, who seemed to offer a hope of righting the injustices I saw all
around me.”
He was deployed to China with the
U.S. army towards the end of World War II, and had an opportunity there to seek
out his fellow Communists. He was swept
up in the romance of China’s revolution, as well as the personal charisma of
Chairman Mao:
“This
was the Mao Zedong I had been reading about in the daily press, the Mao whose
words I had studied in Stanford. I
respected his vision for China and admired his philosophical brilliance. And here I was, twenty-five years old… sitting
and chatting with Mao Zedong as an equal…
Mao had a way of focusing his gaze squarely on whoever was speaking,
shutting out the rest of the room. The
attention was intense and flattering.”
He became a vital part of Mao’s staff, fulfilling the important
role of English-Chinese translation.
He had many friends among Mao’s
inner circle, and soon married a fellow party member named Wei Lin. The romance didn’t last too long though, as
only a few years after joining the revolution, Rittenberg found himself
suddenly arrested, as a supposed American spy.
He was carried off to solitary confinement, taken out only for periodic
interrogations, where his protests of innocence were ignored, and the only
issue was how to confess to his crimes.
Amazingly, his faith in Communism did not waiver as he spent six years
alone in a cell:
“I
loved the party, its aims, and its struggle to change the world…. They were prosecuting my case because they
considered it in the interest of the much oppressed, long wronged Chinese
people. They had to purge themselves of
enemies, I told myself. It was just
that in my case they were wrong… The
problem wasn’t with the party or its methods…
If the fact that they wrongly charged me with a horrible crime became
known, it could harm the party.
I
made up my mind. This dark little room
would be a test for me and a proving ground for my philosophy— and philosophy
would win. If I came through this
ordeal, it would be with perfect understanding.”
As it turned out, the Party had
actually arrested him on orders from their sponsor, Soviet General Secretary
Joseph Stalin, rather than out of a serious belief that he was a spy. Thus, a few years after Stalin’s death, his
friends in the leadership were able to get him released and rehabilitated. They even appointed him a high-level trusted
position in the Broadcast Administration, a propaganda arm of Mao’s
government. He had, however, lost his
wife, who had divorced him while he was locked away.
You would think that his
experience would generate some sympathy towards others falsely accused by the
regime, but that’s not how he thought.
When some young translators in his group were later arrested on similar
political charges, he didn’t do much to help them. As he wrote:
“… their real crime seemed to be that while outwardly quiet and
respectful, underneath they were arrogant and exclusive, with the kind of rich
man’s air that had been so common before the Revolution.
“In
the end, Cheng Hongkui was pronounced a member of a reactionary clique, and he
and his wife and their new baby were sent with their friends to a labor camp in
the cold wastelands of Manchuria. I
never saw any of them again… For me, I
felt that good honest farm labor would do them some good. Hadn’t I been willing myself to undergo years
of privation for the sake of the party?”
As events moved forward in China,
Rittenberg doubled down on his faith in Communism. In 1958 he enthusiastically supported the
Great Leap Forward, Mao’s program to rapidly collectivize farms, industrialize
the country, and build infrastructure.
Similar to the Soviet activities of the 1930s that we described a few
episodes ago, the government tried to eliminate private farms, arresting and
imprisoning any farmers who resisted collectivization. Farmers were also redirected by the millions
into activities like steel production and construction, supposedly no longer
needed on the farms due to their increased efficiency under state management. The results were similar to those achieved
by Stalin in the Ukraine:
“It was late in 1961 when the first symptoms appeared… People began swelling around their necks and
going through the day in a listless haze…
as the months wore on, it became increasingly difficult to overlook the
real reason for people’s distress:
malnutrition. We had all watched
the food begin to vanish from the shops late in 1960.”
“Few
in China knew the truth until decades later.
The Chinese were not just hungry, they were starving, starving to death
in the countryside by the tens of millions.
Fewer still knew the main cause:
not bad harvests, not the Soviet debt…
but the Great Leap Forward itself.”
Again blinded by his faith in the
system, Rittenberg continued in the Broadcast Administration. At least the deadly results of the Great Leap
Forward resulted in some criticism of Mao and reduction in his power over the
next few years. However, as the nation
slowly recovered, Mao grew jealous of those in control, and decided to engineer
the “Cultural Revolution” to restore Communist purity. He set loose mobs of teenagers to purge the
nation of remnants of capitalism and of non-Communist Chinese tradition. Rittenberg still maintained his faith in his
leader:
“With
the advent of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, I became an outspoken
activist and advocate of returning power to the people… without the least suspicion that this new
revolution was a cynical strategy by Mao— and his wife, Jiang Qing— to foment
unrest and rebellion and to vastly increase their own power.”
He didn’t see the danger of mobs
of teenagers brutally enforcing Communist doctrine, until a pair of old
shopkeepers, in-laws of a co-worker, were beaten to death for practicing
“consumerism”. Ironically, they were actually
operating a state-run shop. Even this
wasn’t enough to stop Rittenberg from supporting the Revolution, though he
began asking some questions. After
that, it didn’t take too long before the movement turned on him, and he was
once again arrested as a suspected American spy, He was put in solitary confinement again.
This time he was confined for
almost ten years. But even worse than
what happened to him were the fates of his second wife Yulin and his four
children (ages 2, 7, 9, and 10) while he was gone:
“After
that, for the next ten years, Yulin was tossed back and forth. Sometimes she was returned to the Broadcast
Administration, where she was the victim of daily struggle meetings and forced
to sit outside the toilet with a sign above her head, “This is the unrepentant
wife of the dog of an imperialist spy.”
Sometimes she was beaten, once badly enough to be sent to the
hospital. Always she was reviled and
ostracized… She was forced to spend up
to three years at labor camps in the countryside, where she worked for long
hours in freezing weather… For Yulin, it
was particularly bitter. The Communist
Party cadre sent to supervise Yulin’s group at one of the labor camps was my ex-wife,
Wei Lin… [as she described:] “They
wouldn’t even give me enough to fill my stomach. I would drag myself to bed at night, legs and
back aching, so tired I could hardly move, and hungry at the same time. I thought of death repeatedly.””
The children had spent some time
in prison, though they were cared for by relatives during most of Rittenberg’s
absence. Miraculously, the entire
family survived the ordeal, and they were reunited upon his release. But this experience was finally enough to
drive Rittenberg to question the system to which he had devoted his life. As he wrote,
“…it took me a long time to see the errors of Communist doctrine
because of the stake I had acquired in the system and the life I had lived in
China, a life of perks, privilege, and deluded complicity.
…I felt that a genuine renewal for China required a leadership that
listened to public opinion, dealt conscientiously with corruption, and thus won
the trust of the people. What I saw was
just the opposite….
I
had come to China to serve humanity, to serve people, to change China, to
change the world. I had no intention of
spending the rest of my life serving those whom power had corrupted, bought by
their perquisites, rendered unable to speak or act freely for what I believed
in.”
After his second release,
Rittenberg moved with his family to the U.S. where he rediscovered his
capitalist roots. He started a
successful consulting company with his wife, to provide cultural advice to
companies doing business in China. One
of the closing thoughts in his book seems especially relevant to what’s going
on in the streets today:
“In
my twenties, I was sure that there was only one answer, and that I knew what it
was: socialist revolution. Half a
century later, I find myself struggling more and more with questions and
finding fewer and fewer answers.”
[Closing conversation]
You might argue that despite his
sixteen years in solitary confinement, Rittenberg got off kind of lightly,
given his central role in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution,
which destroyed the lives of tens of millions of people. But his autobiography, “The Man Who Stayed
Behind”, is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about the 20th
century story of Communist China.
This concludes your Story of Communism for today.
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rittenberg
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
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