Few people can claim to have witnessed history being made, and even fewer  had a hand in shaping it. Sidney Rittenberg, who has died aged 98, did both.
Arriving in China at the end of the Second World War as a young linguist with the US Army, Rittenberg was appalled by the suffering of the masses and the corruption of their rulers. When he heard about a people’s army led by a man called Mao Zedong, he walked for 45 days to track them down at their Yan’an camp. His dedication was rewarded and he became one of the very few Westerners to be admitted into the ‘great leader’s inner circle. 
Soon Rittenberg, who was fluent in Chinese, was watching with Mao the Chairman’s favourite Laurel and Hardy movies, and discussing politics and philosophy with him and Zhou Enlai. first Premier of the People’s Republic of China. He was even given a Chinese name, Li Dunbai, the phonetic translation of Rittenberg.
After joining the Chinese Communist Party in 1946, he used his linguistic skills to translate dispatches and communiqués for the country’s news agencies and the party’s propaganda machine, enthusiastically spreading the regime’s message. A fully committed Maoist, he embraced the Chairman’s view that some violence was inevitable as a revolution – “can’t be civilized, gracious or gentle”.
Even when he found himself the target of that violence, Rittenberg kept on believing. Twice he was thrown into jail, the first time, in 1949, after Stalin denounced him as an American spy. He spent six years in solitary confinement and his Chinese wife, Wei Lin, left him out of loyalty to the Party.
Yet he didn’t waver. After he was released both Mao and Zhou supposedly apologised for his wrongful incarceration and Rittenberg started rising through the ranks. He supported Mao’s every fateful and tragic decision: the Great Leap Forward, even if the result was mass famine; the Cultural Revolution, in spite of its witch-hunts and purges.
His devotion to the party line knew no bounds: he perfected the art of self-criticism and did not hesitate to shame friends and colleagues at public rallies. All the while, he was much sought after by Beijing’s foreign community for his high connections and his profound knowledge of the country.
His second downfall, in 1968, was somewhat inevitable: he was accused again of being a Western spy. His accuser was said to be Mao’s wife and Gang-of-Four member, Jiang Qing. The outcome this time around was even more devastating than before for Rittenberg: 10 years in solitary confinement for him, three years in a labour camp for his third wife, Wang Yulin, while their children were sent to live with relatives.
Released in 1977, Rittenberg was again restored to a comfortable life but something in him had shifted: he had stopped being a believer. Two years later he returned to the US (never having given up his citizenship) with his family. It was the beginning of the last chapter in the Rittenberg saga.
Sidney Rittenberg was the son of Muriel Sluth and Sidney Rittenberg Sr, who was president of the City Council of Charleston, South Carolina. His was a politically committed family: Sidney’s paternal grandfather, an émigré from Lithuania, had served several terms in the local House of Representatives.
Rittenberg Jr’s desire to create a fairer society was awakened when he witnessed a black man being beaten up by police; after a stint at the University of North Carolina, he became a labour organiser. Conscripted into the army, he was taught Chinese and by the time he arrived in China as an army private in 1945, he was fluent in the language.
Rittenberg had been a member of the Communist Party in the US and was still an ardent Marxist-Leninist. Around him all he could see was the abject poverty of the populace and the rampant corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Even when, after his discharge from the army, he worked for a UN relief agency, corruption was everywhere.
So when he heard about Mao and his army, he was more than ready to join them and gradually learned to overlook things such as human rights in the name of the Revolution. It took 35 years for the scales to fall from his eyes and for Rittenberg to come to see Mao as “a great hero and a great criminal rolled into one.”
After his return to the US Rittenberg didn’t take long to get used to the capitalistic world. Thanks to his deep knowledge of how things worked in China and his still strong connections with the country’s high echelons, he became an invaluable high-level go-between and fixer facilitating deals between western companies (Intel and Microsoft among them) and Chinese businesses. A communist and a capitalist, he was at ease in both worlds.
Sidney Rittenberg’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Wei Lin, and four children: Jenny, Toni, Sunny and Sidney Jr, and five grandchildren.
JULIE CARBONARA

Sidney Rittenberg: born August 14, 1921. Died August 21, 2019.