An American who knows China

One of the first things I did when I came to China in 2003 and perused the large bookshelves in our Beijing office was pull down a volume that captured my eye: The Man Who Stayed Behind.

It was by Sidney Rittenberg, an American who came to China in the mid-1940s and stayed behind, as it were, following the Maoist Revolution. Rittenberg spent some three decades in China, becoming a senior cadre in the government’s propaganda arm. He was thrown in prison twice, for a total of 16 years, and eventually rehabilitated.

Rittenberg left China in the late 1970s for Washington State but remains deeply involved in the country. He’s a consultant for Western companies and is as often in China as back in the States.

After decades, he re-evaluated his once-blind loyalty to the Communist Party and now is a sympathetic, but usually clear-eyed, supporter of China’s evolution. He paid a dear price for his faith in China. And that he remains so supportive after a decade in virtual solitary confinement is a sign that he is a true Friend of China. He’s earned his right to say what he thinks. Many Chinese older than 45 probably still remember Li Dunbai, as Rittenberg was called, the only American citizen allowed to join China's Communist Party.

I thought about Sidney recently, who I know only casually. The co-author of his book, Amanda Bennett, was a former senior editor with this newspaper company, and the first time we talked it was about her.

I was in Yan’an in Shaanxi Province, gateway to China’s great northwest, preparing a story about the millions of Chinese who still live in caves. You can see one of the caves in the photo at top. I recalled that Sidney had lived in a cave there at Mao’s side during the revolution. So I emailed him and asked for his thoughts.

Typically, he wrote back at length. I’m excerpting part of his email because it is such an interesting first-hand reflection not only about caves but about the way Chinese treat their own history:

"Well, Tim, I lived in caves for about six months in 1945/46, including 5 months in the loess caves of Yanan -- and I thought it was a great way to live, for the following reasons:

(1) "Cool in summer, warm in winter," as everybody up there says. (xia liang dong nuan) My cave was very easy to heat -- just a little square stone charcoal brazier (we didn't think about carbon monoxide!!) with a few sticks of charcoal glowing would warm the place during the day. When you went to sleep, on your ltitle cot, you'd bank the fire by raking the ashes over the embers and then puff them back to glowing in the morning. All night, it would "take the chill off the air."

(2) I never encountered insects in the cave. The floor was pounded hard, as you describe, in what people called "native cement". There were no windows, of course, only the paper-latticed window and door at the front end of the cave. Life in the cave was quite clean. After boring a new cave out of the hillside, they would leave it unoccupied for the first year to let it dry out, so that by the time someone moved in it was both clean and dry.

(3) The circulation of clean air happened in our caves because, dug into the hills behind the dwelling caves, was an air-raid tunnel that circumnavigated the hill and that got a constant supply of fresh air from vertical vents from the roof of the tunnel to the hillside.

This generally took the form of a strong draught.

Each cave had a little door at the rear that afforded access to the tunnel. If you "cracked" the door a little, instead of keeping it tight closed, you got a strong constant stream of fresh air. Some tunnels had only a muslin curtain in the rear instead of a door, so they got the breeze 24/7. (Mao comments in one of his "Rectification" lectures on the wind blowing out of the air-raid tunnel.) ...
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Here's the big secret, Tim -- something that I didn't find out until I flew back to Yanan for the first time in 1983. The "mountains" in which we lived were not mountains at all -- there were no mountains. Millennia of Gobi dust has piled up to form a high platform atop the high plateau, and millennia of rainfall has plowed deep ravines into the plateau -- the so-called mountains were actually the slopes of the canyons and gulches, while the tops of the "mountains" were actually the flat tops of the plateau! The good land was mainly in the ravines, beside the seasonal rivers, the poor land was at the top.

I must say, I don't like the fancy new cave homes with tile floors etc that people are now shown. Not only that -- Yanan is now a grungy commercial city of two million, and the historic sites are shoved behind and under the shadow of everything else. They should have made the whole district a museum park, and put their commercial center outside of that. Not only that -- the two caves where Mao lived are labeled all wrong, the historical incidents they mentioned and even the times during which he lived there are wrong. And the one building standing when I got to Yanan in 1946 -- the Party Meeting Hall has been totally redesigned and rebuilt, in spite of which they swear that it remains unchanged. I asked the local officials if they thought Chairman Mao really danced every Saturday night on the highly slanted floor that is there now -- they've made it look like a science lecture hall.

We went to the local supermarket, where there is an entire section loaded with candies and pastries of every imaginable kind. I asked the young guide there (21 years old, born and grew up in Yanan) if she knew what was the only desert Yanan children had in the old days. She didn't, so I told her, it was something called "Lenin Biscuits" (liening binggan), which was simply the millet that stuck to the bottom of the pot and that got scraped off after the meal and handed out to the kids. She addressed me politely, all during the visit last March, as "revolutionary grand-father," but there was absolutely no discernible interest in their own history.