The Man Who Stayed Behind - Softcover

Rittenberg, Sidney; Bennett, Amanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822326671 ISBN 13: 9780822326670

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

From the Back Cover

"["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"

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

Rittenberg has written a modern day Pilgrim s Progress, in which he wanders through thirty-five years of Chinese power struggles with his idealism or perhaps naivete astoundingly intact. Russell Watson, Newsweek

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

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

For more than a decade, I have been recording Chinese stories of hope, imprisonment, and disillusion. Nowhere is that story told more poignantly, honestly, or compellingly than in this book. . . . [It] is fascinating, excruciatingly honest, painful to read, and destined to be a classic in the literature of gods that have failed. Anne F. Thurston, the Boston Globe

The gripping saga of an expatriate whose extraordinary experiences left him without illusions about Marxism but with his personal ideals triumphantly intact. Kirkus Reviews

Rittenberg lived a strange life, but he is not a stranger. Seen from the inside, his life of perks, privilege, and deluded complicity makes sense. In the ultimate test of good autobiography, we see with a shock how it could have been us. Andrew J. Nathan, the Washington Post

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822326671
• ISBN 13: 9780822326670
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496