The Man Who Stayed Behind

The Man Who Stayed Behind is the remarkable account of Sidney Rittenberg, an American who was sent to China by the U.S. military in the 1940s. A student activist and labor organizer who was fluent in Chinese, Rittenberg became caught up in the turbulence that engulfed China and remained there until the late 1970s. Even with access to China’s highest leaders as an American communist, however, he was twice imprisoned for a total of sixteen years. Both a memoir and a documentary history of the Chinese revolution from 1949 through the Cultural Revolution, The Man Who Stayed Behind provides a human perspective on China’s efforts to build a new society. Critical of both his own mistakes and those of the Communist leadership, Rittenberg nevertheless gives an even-handed account of a country that is now free of internal war for the first time in a hundred years.

Table of Contents:
Notes on Spelling and Pronunciation Map Introduction / Michael Hunt Key Names 1. The Death of the Wood Fairy 2. The Famine 3. The New Fourth Army 4. In Mao’s Caves 5. High Autumn and Bracing Weather 6. My Long March 7. The Year of Darkness 8. Learning to Live 9. The Brave New World 10. Redder Than Red 11. The Golden Age 12. A Leap in the Dark 13. The Great Hunger 14. The Inner Circle 15. The Good Life 16. Arouse the Masses 17. Smash Everything Old 18. Seize Power 19. Hold Power 20. Power Prevails 21. The Ice House 22. The Dynasty Collapses 23. Coming Home Epilogue Acknowledgments Index

About the Author :
Sidney Rittenberg is President of Rittenberg Associates, Incorporated-a China consulting firm. He resides on Fox Island, Washington, with his wife, Yulin. Amanda Bennett is Managing Editor of The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon and former Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta.

Review :
From reviews of the cloth edition: "[The Man Who Stayed Behind] reads like a riveting historical novel. But there's no fiction here ... it's Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the Long March, solitary confinement, despair, romance, and redemption. Sidney Rittenberg's story is a classic."- Mike Wallace, CBS-TV 60 Minutes "I found The Man Who Stayed Behind hard to put down. No American has ever merged as fully, hopefully-and disastrously-with Communist China as Rittenberg did for four decades from the 1940s. The book is lively, poignant, and revealing. Rittenberg offers a window on Beijing politics that anyone seriously interested in China's recent past and likely future should read."- Ross Terrill, author of China in Our Time "Rittenberg has written a modern day Pilgrim's Progress, in which he wanders through thirty-five years of Chinese power struggles with his idealism-or perhaps naivete-astoundingly intact."- Russell Watson, Newsweek "Sidney Rittenberg has had one of the most remarkable lives of anyone I have ever met. The story of his life is not only a fascinating and valuable witness to one of the greatest historical upheavals of [the twentieth] century, but is a vivid testimony to the power of good in the midst of evil."-Billy Graham "An extraordinary and revealing account of how someone was swept into the Chinese Communist movement and stayed with it through its many blunders, excesses, and cruelties... A fascinating autobiography-honest, moving, chilling, and quite illuminating."- Dr. Michel Oksenberg, Former National Security Council Aid on China Policy "For more than a decade, I have been recording Chinese stories of hope, imprisonment, and disillusion. Nowhere is that story told more poignantly, honestly, or compellingly than in this book... [It] is fascinating, excruciatingly honest, painful to read, and destined to be a classic in the literature of gods that have failed."- Anne F. Thurston, the Boston Globe "The gripping saga of an expatriate whose extraordinary experiences left him without illusions about Marxism-but with his personal ideals triumphantly intact."- Kirkus Reviews "Rittenberg lived a strange life, but he is not a stranger. Seen from the inside, his 'life of perks, privilege, and deluded complicity' makes sense. In the ultimate test of good autobiography, we see with a shock how it could have been us."- Andrew J. Nathan, the Washington Post "In a class by itself ... This story is off the wall, amazing, unbelievably funny and sad... What I want to know is: Where are the miniseries people?"- Carolyn See, the Los Angeles Times "The Man Who Stayed Behind hooked me from start to finish. These are rare, tragic, sometimes startling insights into Mao's China at its self-destructive worst. Whether you sympathize with Sidney Rittenberg or not (and there will be times when you have doubts) he was there as history was made and unmade, and became part of its scar tissue. His prison portrait of Madame Mao as the shrieking harridan of the Red Terror will stay with me a long time. And his own personal story is an amazing tale in its own right."- Sterling Seagrave, author of The Soong Dynasty " There is nothing like an eyewitness account to heat up historical events... A fascinating, fast-paced read... the personal story-about one man's failure to build a better world, about a stranger's futile efforts to be accepted by a distrustful culture, about dreams proved false and nightmares come true-is rivetting."- Nick Gallo, Seattle Weekly "A gripping story about an idealistic young American who freely cast his lot with the Chinese revolution only to be struck down by that revolution at the floodtide of its success... One lives with him through inhuman cruelty and the mindless horror of sixteen years of solitary confinement."- Leonard Woodcock, First American Ambassador to China