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A revolutionary no more A Washington state man who worked for Mao Tse-tung and lived through some of modern China�s most chaotic years, remains committed to social and economic equality, although he no longer believes in communism By ROB CARSON The Associated Press FOX ISLAND, Wash. � Sipping tea with Sidney Rittenberg in the sunny kitchen of his waterfront home on Fox Island, it�s hard to imagine him as a revolutionary. He�s a quiet, peaceful man, soft-spoken and centered. The only thing about him that appears even remotely radical are his eyebrows, untamed thatches that top his eyes like tangled confetti. But in China, where Rittenberg is known as Li Dunbai, his radical past is legendary. Rittenberg, now 79, played gin rummy with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in the caves at Yanan in the 1940�s. When U.S.-backed bombers flew overhead, he huddled with his comrades, thrust his arm in the air and shouted, "Down with American imperialism!" For the 35 years he lived in China, Rittenberg associated with every important Chinese leader from Mao to the "Gang of Four." As a propagandist, he helped shape the world�s view of Chinese communism. He shook his fist and exhorted crowds of thousands in Tiananmen Square during the Cultural Revolution. And, as a consequence of his fervor, he spent 16 years in solitary confinement in Chinese prisons. A new version of Rittenberg�s book about his experiences, "The Man Who Stayed Behind," is being released in April by Duke University Press. The book � which he wrote with Amanda Bennett, managing editor of The Oregonian � offers a rare, insider�s view of the principles and power struggles that created modern China. It�s a story of the danger of single-minded devotion to ideals and a testimony to the adage: Power corrupts. And it�s a love story. China is where Rittenberg met his wife, Yulin. As Rittenberg talks, she walks into the kitchen. He takes her hand. "She is the real story," he says. "She suffered more than I did." The second time Rittenberg was imprisoned, Yulin was sent to a labor camp where she was subjected to humiliation and psychological torture. At her former place of work, she was forced to sit outside the toilet with a sign over her head that said, "This is the unrepentant wife of the dog of an imperialist spy." "Two times she took me after prison and made me whole again," Rittenberg said. Ironically, Rittenberg, who so fervently condemned American imperialism and the capitalistic system, now works as a consultant to U.S. businesses trying to establish a presence in China. He and Yulin operate the consulting business together, traveling to China five to 10 times a year. In recent years, Rittenberg�s Chinese connections have opened the doors of commerce for the likes of Intel, ARCO, Nintendo, Levi Strauss, Hughes Aircraft and McCaw Cellular Communications. Rittenberg is no longer a Communist. Mao�s dogma, to which he devoted most of his life, he now believes is fatally flawed. Rittenberg says he came to the Communist movement through philosophy, which he studied at the University of North Carolina. He joined the American Communist Party in 1940, when he was 18. That in itself was not so unusual. Before communism was demonized during the Cold War, many American workers and intellectuals were intrigued by the utopia it promised. What was unusual was Rittenberg�s devotion. He threw himself into communist causes, battling for labor unions and civil rights. As a Southerner and an intellectual, he felt he had more to prove about the sincerity of his liberal convictions. Rittenberg now believes that such single-minded devotion is wrong-headed. "I didn�t let myself think critically," he said. Rittenberg lectures in Chinese philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University and Tacoma City College. He says this is what he tells his students: "It�s necessary to have ideals. A man with no ideals is just an empty shell. But it�s important not to be trapped by ideals. "If you lose your ability to examine and critique, you are in danger of becoming an ideologue." Rittenberg didn�t plan to go to China. But after he was drafted in 1942, the Army sent him to Stanford University to study Chinese, and then on to Kunming, in southwestern China, where he worked investigating civilian claims for damages filed against American GIs. He stayed in China after he got out of the Army, landing a United Nations job investigating grain distribution for famine relief. His travels took him to areas controlled by Chiang Kai-shek�s Nationalist government as well as those controlled by the Communists. He was struck by the contrast between them, he said. On the Nationalist side, he saw poverty, corruption and exploitation. Among the Communists there was equality, food for all and an infectious excitement about utopian possibilities. After months of running errands for low-level Communists in outlying cities, Rittenberg at last found an opportunity to work directly for the revolutionaries. He was invited to Yanan, where the innermost circle of Communist strategists lived and worked in bombproof caves tunneled into the sides of cliffs. He walked most of the way to Yanan, he said, traveling for a month and a half, sometimes at night, to avoid Nationalist Army lines. The evening he arrived, in October 1946, Rittenberg stumbled onto a surreal scene. "I could hear a string bass, a couple of fiddles, and maybe a saxophone and a clarinet tooting away ..." he writes in his book. Someone opened a door of a low, stone building, he said, and there was Chairman Mao Tse-tung, dancing the foxtrot. "It was as if a portrait had come down from the wall and came to life," Rittenberg remembers. Working in Yanan, Rittenberg was enchanted by Mao and by the communist cause in general. "It was a popular movement that stood for solid values, democracy and support for the ordinary working people." Rittenberg�s honeymoon with the Communists ended abruptly in 1949, when he was falsely accused by the Soviets of being an American spy and thrown into prison. He was starved, interrogated, drugged and kept in solitary confinement for six years. But even so, his dedication to Mao and his teaching did not waver. He used the time in solitary for self-criticism, exhorting himself to be a better party member. As Rittenberg reminisces, his son, Sidney Jr., drops by. He�s thoroughly Americanized, a commercial art photographer who, after years in Los Angeles, now lives in Gig Harbor. Sidney Jr. laughs at an old picture of himself, a wary-looking 5-year-old, in a Chinese labor camp. He had never seen a camera before, he said. Rittenberg�s three daughters also have made smooth transitions to America. The eldest now lives just minutes away, after spending 10 years in Alaska. The middle daughter is an acupuncturist in North Carolina. The youngest is a senior network engineer and lives near Seattle. Rittenberg, now a grandfather, looks back on his commitment to communism as something that came entirely from his own idealism. "There�s nobody that can ever make you think something unless you accept it," he said. "I accepted it, on the basis of my own faulty reasoning." "You worked to make yourself not think about your doubts," he said. One doubt that refused to go away, he said, concerned the degree to which it was considered necessary to repress some people in order to promote the welfare of others. "Mao said it was necessary to control �a tiny handful of class enemies� to create a perfect democracy," Rittenberg said. "He said that sometimes you have to be merciless toward some in order to serve the interests of the greater number." Rittenberg accepted that premise for years. During the Cultural Revolution, he says, he participated in humiliating and blaming others whom he knew had done no wrong. In China, he said, there was a hard and fast line. "You harden your heart against normal human feelings toward people." Mao�s path was supposed to lead to freedom, Rittenberg said, but instead it led to dictatorship, enforced by terror. In Chinese tradition, Rittenberg explained, this type of control is referred to as, "Killing the chickens to keep the monkeys in line." "The monkeys are the majority; you can�t kill them," he said. "So you get the monkeys and the chickens together and then you take a chicken and you cut his head off. And you say to the monkeys, �You see what you get if you�re a chicken?� " "And then all the monkeys think, �Whatever I do, I can�t let them think I�m a chicken."� Rittenberg�s doubts gradually grew to full-blown disillusionment. He was imprisoned again in 1968, after publicly criticizing aspects of Chinese bureaucracy during the Cultural Revolution. By the time he got out, 10 years later, Mao and Chou En-lai were dead, and he no longer believed in repression in the name of freedom. In 1980, Rittenberg moved back to the United States with Yulin and their four children � who by then were young adults. He had never renounced his American citizenship and he says he had no trouble being admitted back to the states. "People were nothing but warm and kind," he said. In 1990, after living in New York, Boston and San Francisco, Rittenberg and Yulin followed their daughter to Washington state, where she had settled with her husband and child. Now, in their Fox Island home, protected by a steel security fence, Rittenberg is worlds away from his concrete cell in China. His office, lined with bookcases sagging from the weight of philosophy, economics and history, has a 180-degree view of Hale Passage and Wollochet Bay. Rittenberg still believes, as he did when he was 18, that working for the good of others is the best way to spend one�s life. He sees no irony in the fact that he now works with capitalist companies making inroads into China. It is consistent, he says, with his lifelong desire to help the Chinese people. Helping China move into the computer age, he believes, will speed them on their way to democracy. In retrospect, Rittenberg said he wishes he had been more detached from the political movement he embraced. But for all of communism�s faults, he said, there is no denying that it dramatically improved the lives of the Chinese people. And capitalism, too, has its shortcomings, he said. Among them: greed and the disparity between rich and poor. "It�s not enough to have nothing but the profit motive," he said. "Get mine" is not enough to produce a good society. "Reliable human happiness is tied up with working for the freedom and happiness of other people." 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