An American who lived the history of Mao's rise and fall

China will develop a democracy, Rittenberg says, but probably in its own time and way. The party's failure in delivering on its promises after 1949 – land for peasants, democracy, and fairness – was inherent in the ideology of Chinese communism.

"I feel it wasn't just Mao, or good or bad people in charge ... but in using dictatorship to achieve democracy, you turn out not to get democracy, just more dictatorship."

Today, he has come to feel that the American revolution was uniquely successful."When you read Washington and Jefferson, it's clear America came much closer to achieving its ideals than France, Russia, or China."

Rittenberg's recent memoirs, "The Man Who Stayed Behind," is serialized in the Shanghai Evening News under his Chinese name, Li Dunbai. Well past 80 years old, Rittenberg remains indefatigable, an adroit speaker, and funny (he quipped to a packed house in Beijing that the audience must have mistaken him for New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the next speaker.) Rittenberg "figures in a long line of 'China helpers,' " says Roderick MacFarquhar, an authority on China at Harvard University. "He is enormously experienced in the ways of the Chinese people."

China experts describe Rittenberg's endless energy. "So many people who took part in the story of China simply went down," says a friend. "Either they were killed or died indirectly, or went into solitude. Rittenberg ... never took an obstacle for the end of the road."

Rittenberg turned down a scholarship to Princeton University to study philosophy at the University of North Carolina. The Army had him study Japanese for the US occupation after World War II. But, he says, he did not want to spend years in Japan. So he switched to Chinese, thinking he would come home early, and went to Stanford University. He knew French, Latin, and German. But he fell in love with Chinese. "It was magical.... I still get excited about learning a new character."

Once in China with the Army, Rittenberg's interest in the Communist Party thrust him into a cloak-and-dagger-world in Shanghai. He met Zhou Enlai after hearing him speak. China's eventual No. 2 leader politely told Rittenberg he had been clapping too loudly, that Nationalist spies would see this, and it would cause harm. Rittenberg was stunned that Zhou would even have noticed.

A year or two later, Rittenberg walked 500 dusty miles to the caves of Yenan, headquarters of the revolution. His job was to put Mao's message into readable English, and translate world news picked up by Morse code into Chinese (including dispatches from this newspaper). He felt he was helping liberate China from imperial cruelty. Yet in 1949, outside Beijing and on the eve of victory, Stalin sent a special cable that got Rittenberg jailed.

After Stalin died, Rittenberg was exonerated. He was told he never had to work again, that he could have a villa, and was offered funds for leisure travel. "The smartest thing I ever did was go right back to the work I was doing" at state media, he says. "And I met my [second] wife, Yulin, a few weeks later."

It is a life of contradictions: He sat in prison for six years, yet decided he must forgive his jailers. His views on family changed: He used to feel personal life mattered little. But after his second jail term, he felt that if he could only make his wife happy, his life would not be wasted. Again, in the 1960s, he backed a wing of the party more extreme than the infamous "Gang of Four" – yet now is a businessman who feels "radical student movements are not the way to bring change."

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