The new revolution

The revolution and its leaders had changed, too. Mao was no longer the mountain guerrilla of Yan’an. The Communist Party had transformed into an urban leadership overseeing the whole country.

Those leaders tasked Rittenberg with documenting government projects … as well as scrutinizing those the party deemed counter-revolutionary. “Party discipline was everything,” he explains. “If you understood the rules, you obeyed them. If you didn’t, you still obeyed them. You’d learn by doing.”

Rittenberg investigated “rightists” and people with “bad” backgrounds. If the party labeled an individual as counter-revolutionary, the government often sent that person to Manchuria for “reeducation” by way of hard labor.

“At the time I thought it was totally right,” Rittenberg recalls. “I’d just gotten out of prison and … I was 120 percent loyal to the party,”

He reasoned that he’d endured imprisonment for the good of the party, so anyone else going to prison should be grateful for the opportunity to reform themselves for the greater good. “I truly felt we were building a better world, and those people were getting in the way,” he says.

“But of course, it was terribly wrong.”

It was during this period that he met and married Yulin, the love of his life. They had several children together and began to build a family. It seemed as though the better world he had long dreamed of was forming in front of his eyes.

Mao pressed ahead with his ambitious Great Leap Forward modernization campaign. Intending to radically transform China into an industrial superpower, the regime prohibited peasants from owning land and redirected millions of people into steel production.

The state requisitioned grain and funneled it into the cities, leaving the peasants who stayed behind to starve as a historic drought choked the fields. Thirty-six million people died in the ensuing famine. This was the deadliest mass famine in the 20th century.

By the early 1960s, the Chinese government was investigating the Great Leap Forward’s failures. Several senior party leaders openly criticized Mao, who responded by purging and arresting many of his harshest critics.

Embattled and increasingly criticized, Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966. He reached out to the youth, telling them that party officials were exploiting them — and that the bourgeoisie had hijacked the revolution.

These youths later formed the militant Red Guards — a paramilitary social movement of students, farmers and soldiers. Mao and his followers called on them to destroy the “four olds” — old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.

“Young people [had] subordinated their desires to the party,” Rittenberg explains. Mao’s message was that the youth of China had to reclaim their country from the corrupt elders who oppressed them.

“There were young people in the streets sounding like Patrick Henry,” Rittenberg recalls. Mao encouraged the youth to express their hopes and thoughts freely. The American was enthusiastic. “I thought ‘this was what it was supposed to be about,’” he says. “We should have been moving toward a model that was more — not less — democratic.”

Mao ordered the police and army not to interfere. Rittenberg and other revolutionaries believed they were going to finally bring China equality and democracy. “There was celebrating every night, it was like a constant holiday.”

Rittenberg used his platform at China Radio International to stoke the revolution. As an American who spoke fluent Chinese and as a member of the Yan’an generation of revolutionaries, he became an overnight celebrity. But unlike many other Yan’an veterans, he remained a zealot for the cause — without fully understanding the role he played.

“I didn’t pay close attention to Mao’s words,” Rittenberg reflects. Ultimately, the revolution had ulterior motives which he didn’t recognize at the time. Particularly, he ignored the part of Mao’s proclamation that the final goal was “the total dictatorship of proletariat.”

“Mao used the Cultural Revolution to go after the bureaucrats and anyone else he saw as his enemy, even though most of them weren’t really his enemies to begin with,” Rittenberg says. “He became paranoid.”

The Red Guards ransacked and vandalized ancient temples and destroyed thousand-year-old works of art. In response, Zhou ordered the army to protect historic sites in Beijing — but many others around the country remained undefended.

The Red Guards’ campaign expanded. The movement denounced civil war and World War II veterans in the press and on the street. Targets included close friends of Rittenberg such as Madame Soong and war hero Zhu De. Students accused teachers and other authority figures of being counter-revolutionaries. Members of the movement accused each other.

Rittenberg recounted a high school Red Guards unit that would kidnap rival students and record their screams as they tortured them. “They would play it to harden their troops for the class struggle,” he explains.

He added that this faction was particularly sadistic and that most Red Guards didn’t sink to those depths. Nevertheless, the movement subjected thousands of intellectuals and average people to humiliation and abuse. “There was great cruelty and suffering,” Rittenberg says.

By September 1967, targets of the revolution expanded to include foreigners. He even participated in condemning some of his fellow foreigners. But then members of the Red Guards turned on him — putting up a pamphlet titled, “How an American seized Red Power at Radio China International,” at the radio station.

Authorities arrested him in February 1968 along with several other foreigners. He returned to prison. “I’d been through it once before,” he muses. “So I knew what I was in for.”

Soldiers took him from Yulin and his children for 10 years. During this second imprisonment, he penned a new Confucian saying, “Man who climbs out on limb should listen carefully for sound of saw.”