Sidney Rittenberg; American adviser to Chinese communists
After Army service in World War II brought him to China, a young South Carolina native and labor activist named Sidney Rittenberg stayed on to help build a new world power forged by a communist revolution.
Rittenberg, who was 98 when he died Aug. 24 at a nursing center in Fountain Hills, Arizona, became one of a handful of Americans who lived behind the lines of a country that developed into a bitter Cold War enemy. He was widely considered one of the most powerful Westerners advising the Chinese government in the 1950s and ‘60s, but he paid a steep price for his front-row vantage point. Rittenberg was twice imprisoned and spent 16 years in solitary confinement, swept up in the fickle tyranny and convulsive whims of his friend Mao Zedong.
On the surface, he was an unlikely radical, the scion of a politically prominent Charleston family. But his scorn for Jim Crow laws and authority shaped his temperament as he became a union organizer and Communist Party member in the American South.
In China, he saw poverty and suffering on a mass scale. A chance encounter in 1946 with Mao, founder of Communist China, sealed his ambition to stay on.
“I walked in the door and there he was,” Rittenberg later recalled. “It was like a picture right out of history, and underneath that was the feeling, ‘I’m now part of history.’”
Easygoing and charismatic, even in his second language, Rittenberg developed a rapport with Mao and Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Communist Party’s second-in-command. They discussed life in America, played cards and watched the English-language films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, two of Mao’s favorite comedians, as Rittenberg provided the translation.
After Mao’s seizure of power in 1949 over the corrupt U.S.-backed Nationalist Party, which enjoyed little support among the population, Rittenberg was rewarded with appointments at Chinese news and propaganda agencies. His positions and his connections did not save him from falling victim to periodic crackdowns inflicted en masse as Mao solidified his personality cult.
Rittenberg seemingly took it in stride.
A stalwart supporter of the regime, he believed that a little violence was inevitable in a revolution, even one ostensibly devoted to peace and equality. “A revolution is not like inviting guests to dinner,” he said in “The Revolutionary,” a 2012 documentary about his life, paraphrasing Mao. “It can’t be that civilized, that courteous, that gracious, that gentle.”
The communist leader’s death in 1976, followed by a thaw in relations with the United States, accelerated Rittenberg’s release from jail for a second time.
He was feted as a celebrity in China and a figure of enduring mystery, fascination and repulsion back home, seen by many as a naive and all-toowilling participant in some of the Communist regime’s gravest excesses.
For the remainder of his working life, he became an unofficial ambassador between China and the United States, a “translator of cultures” fluent in the habits and thinking of the East and the West, said journalist Amanda Bennett, who co-wrote his memoir, “The Man Who Stayed Behind” (1993).
“He is one of the few people who understands why China went through what it did,” added Bennett, one of the Wall Street Journal’s first correspondents in China and current director of Voice of America. “He was a zealot,” but he eventually “was able to step out of himself and look at what had happened and what was wrong with what he believed.”