Sidney Rittenberg

On his release in 1955 Rittenberg remained a strong supporter of Mao and actively and enthusiastically supported the Great Leap Forward. Later he was a supporter of the Cultural Revolution and briefly associated with Mao's inner circle, leading a group of rebels to take over the state broadcasting institution. On April 8, 1967, the People's Daily published a long article written by him.

Rittenberg said, though, that after he objected to the excesses of the period he was arrested and placed back in solitary confinement, from 1967 to 1977. On his release he emigrated to the United States.

In 1949, immediately before the formal surrender of Beijing to the Communists, Rittenberg said he was summoned to the capital and he went, expecting to play a role in promoting the Communist takeover to the rest of the world. In fact Rittenberg was arrested and placed in solitary confinement, because Stalin had denounced him as a US spy. Rittenberg attributes his survival in solitary confinement to a poem by Edwin Markham:

Sidney Rittenberg (Chinese: 李敦白; pinyin: Lǐ Dūnbái; August 14, 1921 – August 24, 2019) was an American journalist, scholar, and Chinese linguist who lived in China from 1944 to 1980. He worked closely with Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, and other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Chinese Communist Revolution, and was with these central Communist leaders at Yan'an. Later, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement, twice. In his book "The Man Who Stayed Behind", Rittenberg stated that he was the second American citizen to join the CCP, the first being the Lebanese-American Doctor Ma Haide (born Shafick George Hatem.)