The Man Who Stayed Behind

by Sidney Rittenberg

Overview

The Man Who Stayed Behind is the remarkable account of Sidney Rittenberg, an American who was sent to China by the U.S. military in the 1940s. A student activist and labor organizer who was fluent in Chinese, Rittenberg became caught up in the turbulence that engulfed China and remained there until the late 1970s. Even with access to China’s highest leaders as an American communist, however, he was twice imprisoned for a total of sixteen years.
Both a memoir and a documentary history of the Chinese revolution from 1949 through the Cultural Revolution, The Man Who Stayed Behind provides a human perspective on China’s efforts to build a new society. Critical of both his own mistakes and those of the Communist leadership, Rittenberg nevertheless gives an even-handed account of a country that is now free of internal war for the first time in a hundred years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822326670
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2001
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.16(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Sidney Rittenberg is President of Rittenberg Associates, Incorporated—a China consulting firm. He resides on Fox Island, Washington, with his wife, Yulin.

Amanda Bennett is Managing Editor of The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon and former Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta.

Table of Contents

Notes on Spelling and Pronunciation


Map


Introduction / Michael Hunt


Key Names

1. The Death of the Wood Fairy


2. The Famine


3. The New Fourth Army


4. In Mao’s Caves

5. High Autumn and Bracing Weather

6. My Long March


7. The Year of Darkness


8. Learning to Live


9. The Brave New World

10. Redder Than Red


11. The Golden Age


12. A Leap in the Dark


13. The Great Hunger


14. The Inner Circle


15. The Good Life


16. Arouse the Masses


17. Smash Everything Old


18. Seize Power


19. Hold Power


20. Power Prevails


21. The Ice House


22. The Dynasty Collapses


23. Coming Home

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

The Man Who Stayed Behind hooked me from start to finish. These are rare, tragic, sometimes startling insights into Mao’s China at its self-destructive worst. Whether you sympathize with Sidney Rittenberg or not (and there will be times when you have doubts) he was there as history was made and unmade, and became part of its scar tissue. His prison portrait of Madame Mao as the shrieking harridan of the Red Terror will stay with me a long time. And his own personal story is an amazing tale in its own right.”—Sterling Seagrave, author of The Soong Dynasty


“A gripping story about an idealistic young American who freely cast his lot with the Chinese revolution only to be struck down by that revolution at the floodtide of its success. . . . One lives with him through inhuman cruelty and the mindless horror of sixteen years of solitary confinement.”—Leonard Woodcock, First American Ambassador to China


“An extraordinary and revealing account of how someone was swept into the Chinese Communist movement and stayed with it through its many blunders, excesses, and cruelties. . . . A fascinating autobiography—honest, moving, chilling, and quite illuminating.”—Dr. Michel Oksenberg, Former National Security Council Aid on China Policy


“I found The Man Who Stayed Behind hard to put down. No American has ever merged as fully, hopefully—and disastrously—with Communist China as Rittenberg did for four decades from the 1940s. The book is lively, poignant, and revealing. Rittenberg offers a window on Beijing politics that anyone seriously interested in China’s recent past and likely future should read.”—Ross Terrill, author of China in Our Time


“Sidney Rittenberg has had one of the most remarkable lives of anyone I have ever met. The story of his life is not only a fascinating and valuable witness to one of the greatest historical upheavals of [the twentieth] century, but is a vivid testimony to the power of good in the midst of evil.”—Billy Graham


“[The Man Who Stayed Behind] 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.”—Mike Wallace, CBS-TV 60 Minutes

From the Publisher

Rittenberg studied Chinese at Stanford in 1943 hoping for a short tour of duty in China and a return home at the end of the war. Instead, appalled by the conditions he found there, he joined the Chinese Communist Party and remained in China for 35 years, 16 of which were spent in prison in solitary confinement. Writer Bennett helps him tell his unique story. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

The dramatic odyssey of an American who cast his lot with mainland China's Communists following WW II—and who lived to regret it. A member of the American Communist Party who had organized coal miners and steelworkers in the South prior to entering the Army in 1942, Rittenberg was trained as an interpreter. Posted to Asia, the author stayed on as a UN employee after V-J Day, and he soon joined forces with the Reds who eventually wrested control of China. The only US citizen ever to be accepted by the Chinese CP, Rittenberg earned his keep as an upper-echelon official in the Party's Broadcast Administration before, during, and after the Revolution. An ardent leftist, he gave his intellectual and ideological all to the presumptively common cause—and, for his pains, he was twice imprisoned, for a total of 16 years. Though rehabilitated following a ten-year stay behind bars that began at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he and his loyal Chinese wife made for the States in 1980. Here, with the help of Wall Street Journalist correspondent Bennett (The Death of the Organization Man, 1990), Rittenberg offers an account of his China sojourn that's remarkable, among other reasons, for its near- perfect pitch. At the outset, he tells his tale in the same awed tones as might a callow, hero-worshipping youth. Subsequently, as he gains maturity and perspective, his voice becomes that of an aging radical no longer willing to swallow the metamythical pronouncements of despots whose lust for power has undermined a shared vision. Throughout, moreover, Rittenberg (who turned 70 last year) provides insightful takes on Mao, Jiang Qing (Mao's hard- driving wife), Zhou En-lai, Lin Biao, DengXiaoping, and other notables with whom he treated during his 35 years in China. The gripping saga of an expatriate whose extraordinary experiences left him without illusions about Marxism—but with his personal ideals triumphantly intact. (Eight pages of b&w photographs, one map—not seen)

Kirkus Reviews