Sidney Rittenberg with one of his commie buddies.

Why is it that a list of famous western communists reads like the roster of your local B'nai B'rith? Divisive conspiracy theories aside, Jews born in the West are aliens in their own homeland , unless it's New Yawk. Being automatically on the outside leads one to get inside the alternative.

In Sidney Rittenberg's case, he got on the inside of the Chinese Communist Party like no Yank before or since, befriending Mao, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and other PRC all-stars. He did sixteen years in Chinese jail for his allegiance, leaving China just when things started getting good, in 1979. He comes back often though, and at a spry eighty eight proves that if you stay behind long enough, you come out in front.

Don't let the Revenge of Hollywood fool you; old Southern society had its charms, but a Jewish kid in Charleston didn't attend any debutante balls. No Yeshiva boy, Rittenberg went to a military academy, and then turned down a full ride at Princeton to attend the University of North Carolina, majoring in philosophy. In theory, communism is the perfect solution for those relegated to the outside, and Rittenberg joined the party while still in college.

He left it to join the army in 1942. A natural linguist with solid German and French skills, Rittenberg chose Mandarin rather than Japanese at the army's Far Eastern School, figuring that since the Chinese were American allies, he'd be home that much sooner. Irony, and the tenacity of life's purpose, would make his sojourn nearly four decades.

Rittenberg was first sent to Kunming, where he learned the real meaning of class oppression. He attributes his commitment to China to his first case as a language specialist in Kunming's Judge's Advocate office, Li Muxian, Wood Fairy Li. An urchin, she had been run down by an army jeep, driven by a soldier who in his own deposition admitted, "I said to myself I'm gonna see how close I can get to that little slopey girl, and goddamn if I didn't run her over, so I figured I've got to get the hell out of here."

The Kuomintang was doing a great job of fanning communist sentiment, too. Rittenberg once returned to his jeep to find two KMT soldiers tying up a beggar and his son. They had been loitering near the jeep, and the soldiers were going to trundle them off for execution on suspicion of intent to steal. Touring famine-struck swaths of China, he saw heaps of starved corpses down the road from warehouses bursting with grain, owned by merchants waiting for the price to go up a few cents before selling to Chiang Kai-shek's finest. In a land where life was so senselessly cheap, socialism wasn't for the outsider; it was for anyone with a grain of compassion.

Now take a compassionate, bright, idealistic youngster with a bent for philosophy, and send him to Yan'an, the cave-home of Chinese Socialism, and you have the makings of a lifelong disciple. In those salad days, every action committed by the PLA leadership was held up for group scrutiny, to make sure it adhered to principles of justice and proletarianism. Those were the days when Mao made up a jingle his whole camp learned by heart:

Let everyone say what they think;

Get it all out;

Hold your critic blameless;

Control yourself as you listen;

If you have the fault - change it;

If  you don't have it - guard against it.

Many young men have joined less-worthy organizations on shakier grounds. As Rittenberg himself says, "In prosperous America I had grown up anxious about prejudice, poverty, and hunger. Here in dirt-poor Yanan, I had virtually no wants. I was issued three suits of clothes a year, one in winter, two in summer. My medical care was free. My food was free. My monthly stipend went into my trunk and gathered dust. The party satisfied my every need."

In return, he satisfied the party's need for a foreign devotee who could interpret and translate. He stayed close to the bosom of the party's leadership, particularly Zhou Enlai, who Rittenberg remembers as a man of uncanny EQ. He sent requests to Roosevelt on behalf of Mao to wangle a White House visit. Rittenberg is convinced that, had the U.S. met and counseled a then-admiring Mao Zedong, both the Korean and Vietnam wars would have been averted. As it was, America's spurning of Mao's open hand led inadvertently to a stretch in the clink for Rittenberg.

By 1949, Russia was in the big brother seat, ready to send much-needed aid to a struggling new China. Stalin, among other conditions, demanded that the "American traitor" in the party's ranks be dealt with. Perhaps they had no choice other than to jail him, but his former benefactors locked Rittenberg in solitary, a dark cell where he wouldn't see the light of day for the next six years.

The keeping of his sanity during that stretch in hell, Rittenberg attributes to his philosophy training. Perhaps he did lose some of his common sense in that stygian pit. After Stalin's death, he was released. A sensible man would have considered himself well-bitten and thrice shy, and gotten the hell out of Dodge with all due expediency. But, what with Mao and Zhou publicly apologizing to him, making him a ranking member of the Communist Party and official hero of the cause, Rittenberg decided that the hard times were over and that he would do best in China. Perhaps, as many an expat-turned-immigrant can understand, China had gotten into his blood.

Soon he had a Chinese wife and family, and was working in journalism and broadcasting, as well as doing copious translating. Astonishingly, or fittingly, given his time in limbo polishing his integrity to a fine if impractical point, he dared to question China's leadership at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and by 1968 found himself locked up again. This stretch would last ten years.

This time he had a wife and children to live for, great sources of both inspiration and desperation when you're locked away. "It was hard, not only for me," Rittenberg recalls. "My children were spat at and bullied, and my wife was beaten and sent to do hard labor. All she had to do to get rid of it all was to say, 'I didn't know that he was bad, I have nothing to do with his wrong doings.' My wife didn't say that, she kept on telling every questioner that I was a good man."

Finally released after the death of Chairman Mao, Rittenberg packed up his family for a new life in America. Today, besides teaching a Chinese Studies Program at Pacific Lutheran University, he operates Rittenberg & Associates, a consultancy for companies doing business in China. That's right, he's a businessman, but no capitalist, at eighty-eight long past all "ists" and "isms". He's paid all but the ultimate price for speaking his mind, and today has no qualms about pointing out flaws in not just China's but America's regime, mostly for its ignorance in viewing China as a threat. Like all lives that last long enough, Rittenberg's has come full circle, making the man who stayed behind at the forefront of one of the world's most important, and delicate, relationships.

China Expat heartily recommends reading Rittenberg's autobiography, The Man Who Stayed Behind.