The Ordeal of a Cell-Bound China Watcher

“They accused me of being a spy. That’s an insult! It just got me so mad I had to fight.”

Nien Cheng was reviled in rich detail by the Maoist Red Guards who broke into her Shanghai home in 1966 and by the jailers at the No. 1 Shanghai Detention House. But the charge of spying for foreign imperialists aroused the emotions that helped steel her for a 6 1/2-year prison ordeal and two decades later still make her bristle.

“I grew up with a strong sense of loyalty, and duty, to my country. I felt humiliated that they should accuse me, who loved my country, of being a spy. I could not accept it, I had to fight. In prison, sometimes I would get so mad--I was rarely depressed--by and large my predominant emotion was anger.

“But I had to warn myself, no matter how angry you are, never say anything against the Communist Party or Chairman Mao, or I would be sentenced.”

Hope of Freedom

As a political prisoner during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, she not only had to survive cold, dampness, heat, poor food, illness and physical abuse, but also avoid further antagonizing her Maoist captors while withstanding constant pressure to confess “crimes” suspected by political zealots.

Her hope of freedom with self-respect lay in a change of political climate. Forced to be a cell-bound China watcher, she studied the Shanghai party paper each day for clues to political shifts that might mean the outs were making a comeback.

In Los Angeles recently to promote her just-published book, “Life and Death in Shanghai” (Grove Press: $19.95, 547 pages), Cheng turned easily to the factional struggle that convulsed China for most of the decade starting in 1966, and offered a critique of Beijing’s course today.

“Most people talk about the human side of my book” she said, “but I’m more concerned with the political side.”

For Cheng, now 72, being treated as a spy by Maoists ignored her choice of Communist China over Nationalist Taiwan, and belittled her traditional Chinese patriotism.

Born in Beijing, granddaughter of a scholar, daughter of a trained naval officer and government official, Cheng was one of many idealistic young Chinese who went abroad between the two world wars for Western education. The left-wing London School of Economics in the late 1930s introduced her to England’s Fabian socialists, Communist theoreticians Marx and Engels, and a fellow Chinese student who was to be her husband.

War Years in Australia

The war years were spent in Australia, where Cheng’s husband was a diplomat for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government. Returning home with their young daughter in 1948, they were appalled at China under Chiang, and when Mao Tse-tung came to power in 1949, they believed, as did many leftist Chinese intellectuals, that the Communists might mean a new and better China. “We were ready at least to give the new government our good will,” she said. They stayed when Chiang and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan.

Her husband became Shanghai manager for Shell Oil, one of the foreign companies the new Communist regime allowed to continue in China. When he died of cancer in 1957, she stepped in as the Chinese assistant for Shell’s British manager in Shanghai.

The Red Guards who invaded her nine-room home with its three servants abruptly ended this comfortable life. They ransacked her house, smashing many of her prized porcelains and other art objects as remnants of the rotten society that had to be destroyed to make way for the new. Cheng was hauled off to a primitive cell.

“In the beginning I was so depressed, because I was isolated. I realized I needed human contact, so I would shout at the guards: ‘When is the government going to clarify my case? You are not carrying out Chairman Mao’s correct policy. Chairman Mao didn’t tell you to lock up an innocent person who supports the Communist Party.’

“I could never say anything against the party or Chairman Mao, or I would be sentenced, so I always accused whoever I was confronted with of not carrying out Mao’s correct policy.

“You know, they questioned all my friends and servants, and they could never find anybody who told them I said anything against the Communist Party.”

Accused of Spying

Cheng was accused not just of criticizing the party, however, but of spying, and she demanded that her interrogators let her write a statement saying that if they could “find anybody in China from whom I have tried to obtain confidential information, you can shoot me.”

“That wasn’t just a maneuver,” she said. “I really meant it. I believe in the death penalty for spies.” She signed the pledge, and no evidence was found to refute it.

Her interrogators in prison repeatedly ordered her to confess her “crimes,” write a complete self-criticism and implicate accomplices. Certain that she was guilty of no crimes, she puzzled over the real reasons for her incarceration.

“I realized that this was a factional struggle. I was just an unimportant person who had not been involved in factionalism, but the Maoists had pushed me onto the same side as Liu Shao-chi and Deng Xiaoping and the rest. I had hopes that they would make a comeback.”

Liu, China’s head of state and policy rival of Mao and thus a prime target of the Cultural Revolution, died in prison. Deng Xiaoping, Liu’s fellow “capitalist roader” in Maoist propaganda, survived and bounced back to become China’s top leader by the end of the 1970s.

Cheng is convinced that the xenophobic Maoists intended to use the spy charge--and the confession they hoped to wring from her--against then-Premier Chou En-lai, who was trying to block the purges and excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Chou had personally approved a 1956 visit to Shell’s office in London by Cheng and her husband, a trip that a Maoist prison interrogator insisted to Cheng was really for the purpose of reporting to British intelligence officials.

Whatever the political purpose, life in the Shanghai prison was calculated to break all but the strongest. Cheng shivered in her skimpy clothing and came down with fevers and pneumonia in her small unheated cell in the winter. The rice gruel with a bit of fat left her almost too weak to stand, and her gums grew sore and bled; all of her teeth had to be pulled later. Serious bleeding apparently caused by hormonal imbalance was falsely diagnosed at first as cancer of the uterus; a hysterectomy corrected the problem. When she refused to “confess,” handcuffs were clamped on her wrists and left on for days so tightly that circulation was restricted; her hands puffed up and the cuffs cut deeply into her wrists, leaving scars that still show.

“I lived from day to day,” she says. “If I had known on the first day that it would be 6 1/2 years, it would have been a terrible blow.

“I’m a better person now, because I’ve starved, shivered in winter. Now I’m more sympathetic with people who are hungry and homeless. I feel people should have these basic guarantees.”

When the cell door finally opened in 1973 and her Maoist captors told her she was free to go, Cheng refused, saying she would stay until they cleared up her case, apologized and published a statement in the press that she was innocent. The incredulous officials just bustled her out the door. Official exoneration and formal rehabilitation as one wrongfully persecuted were not to come for another five years.

Dread News

Freedom brought the dread news that her daughter, Meiping, was dead. Meiping, 24, an actress at the Shanghai Film Studio when the Cultural Revolution began, had been killed the next year by a political zealot, and her murder covered up as a suicide. Cheng had no word of Meiping in prison, and a packet of the daughter’s clothing handed to her in her cell without explanation had been the only clue that Meiping had become a victim of the chaos.

With no family to keep her in Shanghai, Cheng began to think of leaving China, and in 1980 obtained a passport and moved to Washington, D.C.

“If my daughter had not died, I would not have left China, in spite of what happened to me,” she said. “I would be there helping her with her kids.

“I don’t feel bitter, I don’t hate the Communist Party. I regret that Deng Xiaoping and the others are not courageous enough to repudiate Mao’s policy. He was on the wrong track since the late 1950s, and they should make that clear. They only said he made mistakes in his old age, and that’s too light.”

Cheng disclaims any unusual courage.

“I wouldn’t use that word, because I don’t think I had more courage than other people (who broke and confessed). But you could say I was ignorant, like somebody who doesn’t know the danger of a mine field and walks through it. I didn’t think they would kill me, because I was more useful to them alive than dead.

“I must point out two differences between me and others who buckled under the pressure.

“First, I had never earned a penny from the Communist government. They did not hold my rice bowl. I think when you’re economically independent, you have more strength to resist. I had money in banks in Hong Kong and Zurich, and I knew I could write for monthly remittances and could start over again.

“Second, I had never been through a political movement. I was not in government organizations, and earlier movements were carried out in those units. The Cultural Revolution was my very first and my last. It was carried out nationwide, so I got involved. But other people had been involved in earlier political movements, and by degrees they had already been pushed down.”

And Cheng, “a Christian by marriage”--her husband’s mother was Christian--credits prayer with helping to maintain her equilibrium in prison.

Her book, a gripping story and personal account of the Cultural Revolution, took her three years to write, in longhand and on a manual typewriter--overcoming the prison-born arthritis in her hands--five drafts, in English.

“Life and Death in Shanghai” was a Book of the Month Club main selection, and was the cover story in a June issue of Time magazine, with extensive excerpts inside.

Now Cheng hopes for “a quiet and peaceful life” in her new home. She is taking courses at American University on the American novel, short fiction and the Bible as literature. She plans to take a course on the Constitution this fall and hopes to become a U.S. citizen next year.

“I want to prepare to become a worthy citizen of this country, and when I become a worthy citizen of the United States, my loyalty will be for America. To me, it means a lot. If you’re a citizen of a country, you must be loyal to that country.”