Imagethief

Today a colleague sent Imagethief a link to an interesting article from the UAE-based newspaper The National about one of the very small group of foreigners who came to China before or during the Communist Revolution and have stayed ever since. The article, a couple of weeks old but still worth a read, chronicles the life of Mr. Sidney Shapiro, an American communist who came to China in 1947 and has been here ever since. Much of the story is dedicated to contrasting Shapiro with another, better known American communist, Sidney Rittenberg, author of the memoir The Man Who Stayed Behind:

As a writer, Shapiro’s customary style is plain and affable, in the manner of a grandfather at Thanksgiving dinner. He is a devoted user of the exclamation point. He can be biting on occasion, but only in mild, folksy language: he calls Nikita Khrushchev a “pipsqueak” and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a “screwball.”

Only one subject makes Shapiro lose his temper, and it isn’t imperialism or the lamas of Tibet (though he has compared them to Nazis). He reserves his fullest ire for a man to whom he bears a few resemblances – an elderly Jewish American who learnt Mandarin in the army, settled in Beijing with a Chinese wife, worked as a translator, and wrote a book about his experiences. His name is also Sidney.

Sidney Rittenberg is the 86-year-old author of The Man Who Stayed Behind (1993), a memoir of his experiences in China from the 1940s until he moved back to America in 1980. The book has been far more widely read than Shapiro’s autobiography, largely because it was co-written by a professional journalist, Amanda Bennett, and so possesses a scene-driven, concentrated quality that Shapiro’s story lacks – but also because it contains up-close portraits of all the Communist leaders. Rittenberg played cards with Mao and Zhou Enlai, danced with Jiang Qing, and was even set up on a blind date with Wang Guangmei, eventual wife to Sixties-era head of state Liu Shaoqi. As a party member – unlike Shapiro – Rittenberg had access to secret information, like Central Committee memos to his work unit. While Shapiro’s story is that of an American slowly becoming a Chinese common man, Rittenberg’s purports to be an inside account of the Maoist elite.

Both men were prominent figures in Beijing’s foreign community, but they were never friends. In fact, they detest each other. Shapiro has gone out of his way to blast Rittenberg, calling him a “poseur,” a “hypocrite,” “an obvious hustler,” “a typical high-pressure salesman,” a “slippery liar” and “a shockingly inept and transparent spinner of tall tales.”

Rittenberg, for his part, doesn’t deign to mention Shapiro’s name in print, but in a recent phone interview from his home near Seattle, he offered a series of unverifiable claims casting aspersions on Shapiro’s political beliefs, his role in China’s foreign-expert community, and even his personal life. “Sidney Shapiro is one of my least favourite people in the world,” he said. “My question is, how sincerely was he dedicated to the Chinese revolution, and how much was it a way of getting ahead in the world – and getting ahead in China?”

The two Sidneys, perhaps, stand for opposing approaches to the Mao era. Shapiro’s regard for Communism seems based almost entirely on the system’s practical value: he had seen poverty and corruption under the previous regime, and he thought that Mao had effectively changed things. Shapiro never met any senior figures (though his wife did), he never had a high-ranking position, and he never claimed to know more about Maoism than anyone else.

Rittenberg, on the other hand, was an ideas man. He’d joined the Communist Party in America before the war, and after an army posting in southwestern China he’d deliberately got a job with a UN relief organisation in order to make his way to the Communist headquarters in Yanan. The Chinese Communist Party granted him membership – an extremely rare thing for a foreigner – and even after serving six years in prison, having been mistakenly branded a spy (from 1949 to 1955), he emerged as a true believer in the cause. In Shapiro’s words, he was “holier than Mao”.

The article was interesting but also a bit disappointing. Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Rittenberg are genuinely interesting figures. The bitterness of their comments about each other suggests something more than philosophical differences or the gulf between a run of the mill "foreign expert" (if there can be considered to be such a thing) and a party insider. But there is little illumination. Although the journalist interviewed both men, he seems to stay symphathetic to Shapiro, who is presented as an ideological stalwart while Rittenberg is portrayed as a capitalist backslider, fleeing back to the US to consult for multinational corporations and hustling off to buy iPhones. Given two spells in prison, including one for ten years, it's perhaps not such a hard decision to understand. The story also glosses over the cost Shapiro paid for his allegience to the Chinese cause, both in terms of family and friends back home and the imprisonment of his Chinese life. There seems to me to be much more there that could be told.

Still, it's interesting. Shapiro was a True Believer who went native in a country where doing so was never easy, let alone during the xenophobic days of Maoism. Have a read and see what you think.

Notes:

• The National is a relatively new newspaper that was started in Abu Dhabi with the objective of being something akin to print version of Al Jazeera International (to which it is not related), competing with the likes of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal Asia. It will be interesting to see if they succeed.
  
  
• Disclosure: Imagethief was briefly a colleague of Sidney Rittenberg's son, Sidney Rittenberg Jr. I have no relationship with him now.
  
  
• Hat tip: Matt O. and also Charles Dickens.