A Need to Belong
DRAPER, ROGER
A NEED TO BELONG BY ROGER DRAPER The literature of disillusionment with Communism is disproportionately the work of educated middle-class people. Sidney Rittenberg—an American who joined the...
...no pickpockets, prostitutes, beggars...
...citizen ever granted membership in the Chinese Communist Party, a distinction that made him "more than proud...
...Think for yourselves...
...He also imagined that Mao desired this, for in a secret document that came to his attention the Chairman proposed to "announce to the students that they can march where they want, put posters where they want, and say what they want...
...Besides Mao—who, he thinks, "didn't really like me"—he got to know Jiang Qing, Mao's wife...
...One of them read, "Rittenberg shows all the qualities we have long been accustomed to finding in the Jew...
...At the Broadcast Administration, where he accepted a job polishing scripts and training announcers and editors, he was delighted to find himself "treated like a tried and true Party member for the first time...
...saw America as their preferred source of postwar aid...
...By 1960, food was scarce throughout China...
...Did we waste a great opportunity to influence them...
...We kept ourselves apart from the masses...
...Nevertheless, in 1958 his "doubts and fears were washed away" by the Chairman's decision to launch the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to achieve "real" communism in a generation...
...Not long thereafter, Rittenberg heard a familiar voice shrieking in the corridors: "Oh, Chairman Mao...
...Indeed, he makes capitalism appear to be Communism by other means...
...companies do business in China...
...Zhou publicly called him "Li Dun-bai, the staunch internationalist freedom fighter...
...Today, such a person might enter a cult...
...When Rittenberg made a speech supporting them, it was secretly recorded and disseminated throughout China...
...On the street, he was often recognized and "surrounded by hundreds of young people...
...She and their children were in prison together for eight months and she subsequently spent some time in a labor camp...
...Today he and Yulin run a consulting firm that helps U.S...
...Though he "yearned to be fully part" of the movement, in January 1949, on the eve of its ultimate victory, Rittenberg was jailed on charges of spying for the United States, apparently as a result of his friendship with the American Communist journalist Anna Louise Strong, just arrested in Moscow...
...In 1956 the harvest was so good, and the stores so full of produce, "that people joked about not accepting grapes even as gifts...
...Sidney Rittenberg—an American who joined the Communist Party of China in the late 1940s and spent 35 years there—was raised in a world of "South Carolina houses with thick rich carpets, big kitchens, front and back parlors with pianos, wraparound porches covered with wisteria, and huge yards...
...I was really proud to be accepted as an equal by the workers," he says, recalling the harangues he delivered on speaking tours through the South...
...People began swelling around their necks and going through the day in a listless haze...
...a Communist enclave seemed, by contrast, "a model of fairness and democracy...
...For several years he was systematically underfed, almost to the point of starvation...
...Since he did not share their partiality to the "effete" Somerset Maugham, he condemnded their "decadent" tastes and the authorities exiled them to a Manchurian labor camp...
...He "began doing little favors for the Communists" in Kunming, where he was stationed...
...Yulin was no longer a believer...
...Once free, "I pushed away with both hands the evidence...
...Rittenberg tried to be...
...The Cultural Revolution had begun...
...Ignore all orders that conflict with that...
...Jiang Qing supported the old rebels and blamed their downfall on Rittenberg...
...As the months wore on, it became increasingly difficult to overlook the real reason for people's distress...
...An astrological event...
...Think of the words of the Great Chairman Mao...
...In October 1947, now more Li Dunbai than Sidney Rittenberg, he married a Chinese woman called Wei Lin...
...In February 1968 he was again arrested on charges of spying and placed in solitary...
...Rittenberg enlisted Jiang Qing herself in the struggle to oust the director, and thanks largely to her help, the rebels won...
...But soon their own control was challenged, and to Rittenberg's indignation they "fell back on the tactics they had been raised on": persecution and manipulation...
...During the mid to late 1950s, he notes, "There was no visible police surveillance...
...We [he and his family] were living in special quarters, eating special food, driving in special cars...
...according to him, in fact, they showed an "obvious admiration for almost everything American...
...Perhaps, but Mao was the leader—and as Rittenberg shows, the Chairman was always a terrorist and a Utopian...
...Like many others, Rittenberg insists that the Chinese Communists, "wary of depending too much on Moscow...
...He thought China's problems could be solved by a purer communism...
...their children later followed them...
...After he was drafted in 1942, the Army sent him to study Chinese at Stanford University and then, in September 1945, dispatched him to China as a language specialist...
...Something in the water...
...It doesn't seem to occur to him that these achievements were the blessings of peace after decades of turmoil, rather than of Communism...
...Shortly after his arrival, for instance, he was asked to investigate the staff of the English Section...
...The final blow" was Deng's 1979 decision to shut down the Democracy Wall in Beijing and to imprison the most active poster-writers...
...His second wife, Yulin, had not abandoned him...
...A bookseller had earlier given him the name he used in China, Li Dunbai...
...In Rittenberg's eyes that seemed "a program for the end of Party dictatorship...
...Listening to the radio, Rittenberg heard an announcer declare, "A new day is dawning...
...he disliked the Soviets because Stalin had attempted to depose him in the early '30s, not because of liberal urges...
...I will always be loyal to you...
...As usual, Rittenberg was enthusiastic...
...At the Broadcast Administration, rebels challenged the director...
...Mao's vision, says Rittenberg, excited the whole country and inspired heroic feats of exertion...
...conditions later improved, though he remained in isolation...
...When the Communists asked him to help brush up the English-language propaganda they hoped would win them sympathy in the United States, he agreed...
...Zhou died, then Mao...
...Yulin and the children brought me that my worst fear had come true...
...Moreover, "Growing up a Jew in South Carolina, I had never felt completely accepted...
...Still, Rittenberg believed that China was better off than it had been before 1949...
...The evidence accumulated anyway...
...I branded as selfishness my concern for myself as an individual and gave that up...
...He plunged into the struggle...
...Although Rittenberg did not share those views, he was happy that they could be expressed...
...My heart felt like cold ashes," he says, when Mao changed course and launched a campaign against "Rightists...
...Three of its employees "had admitted liking English literature, a possible ideological problem...
...Newspapers, periodicals and intellectual journals swelled with criticism of the Party...
...I wonder if his search for belonging is quite over...
...Was it a virus...
...November 1977, Rittenberg was freed and exculpated...
...The next year Mao temporarily curtailed political repression...
...In 1966, Mao counterattacked...
...Revolutionaries, arise...
...Posters appeared denouncing him...
...I see now the decisive, constructive role of business in the present era...
...It was the voice of Comrade Jiang Qing, now a prisoner too...
...A year of solitary confinement in a dark cell measuring four paces by three followed, then five years of solitude under better conditions...
...Oh, Chairman, Mao...
...In prison," he writes, he had been terrified of coming out and finding "that my sufferings and loneliness had all been in vain, that socialism had failed...
...Yet his childhood, as he and Amanda Bennett, a former Beijing correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, describe it in The Man Who Stayed Behind (Simon & Schuster, 476 pp., $25), was a lonely and unhappy one, blighted by "my mother's incessant quarreling with my father,'' a successful lawyer in Charleston, "and her hunger for fine things and social position...
...Millions died...
...among her guards was Rittenberg's first wife, who had denounced him...
...In a Kuomintang-controlled region, he observed starvation, corruption and speculation...
...New rebels" supplanted the "old rebels," and themselves "turned into the oppressors the instant they were handed power...
...He was the only U.S...
...It is right to rebel...
...In 1940, as an 18-year-old college student, Rittenberg became a Communist...
...Mao was forced to yield substantive power to Liu Shaoqi, the second man in the hierarchy, and to Liu's disciple, Deng Xiaoping...
...and other top leaders...
...Rittenberg moved on to Communist headquarters in Yanan to continue his work in the fall of 1946...
...Many of them, however, were very ill-advised: For example, in a town he visited—and not only there?All the robust young men had answered Mao's call to go to the hills to prospect for more iron ore," and the crops rotted in the fields...
...It was malnutrition...
...It was late in 1961 when the symptoms appeared...
...Zhou Enlai, "a great friend...
...This, in short, is the fascinating and eloquent story of a man whose life has been a search for belonging...
...And I can see with my own eyes how, as our ventures flower, the lives of the common people of China improve along with them...
...The system was becoming corrupt, and I had allowed it to corrupt me...
...Wei Lin having remarried, he soon took a second Chinese wife, Wang Yulin, by whom he had three daughters and a son...
...So intense was his need to belong that instead of revolting, "I gave myself over to the party wholly...
...In April 1955 the Party released and exonerated Rittenberg...
...In March 1980 Rittenberg and his wife left permanently for the United States...
...Two months later, Rittenberg's company was posted back to India, but he won permission to stay on and found a job as an observer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 7
