IN JANUARY 1995, I SIGNED UP FOR A GRADUATE COURSE, “THE CHINA of Mao, the China of Deng,” offered by Professor Sidney Rittenberg at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was then a graduate student at the university and I spent a full semester with him, never missing a single lecture, at the largest history department in the United States. Rittenberg was not an ordinary professor. He lived in China from 1945 to 1980 and became the first American to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1946, personally participating in and experiencing the revolutions of Chairman Mao Zedong, whom he knew and served as an advisor.
Rittenberg with Chairman Mao Zedong. Photo by the courtesy of Sidney Rittenberg, from the documentary film, “The Revolutionary.”
It was only natural that I should learn about China from this dedicated scholar who had lived through Mao’s major revolutions: the Hundred Flowers movement which began in May 1956 with the government lifting the restrictions imposed upon Chinese intellectuals and granting greater freedom of thought and speech, but was soon reversed when the criticisms went too far for the party’s liking. I wanted to hear what he had to say about the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1961), Mao’s master plan to boost China’s economy and industry, but this too would end in failure. And, I wanted to learn about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that turned the party against the government from 1966 to 1976.
It was a mild Carolina winter’s afternoon when I first met professor Rittenberg, and we remained friends ever since. In this essay, I aim to explain why he matters to the study of the history of revolutionary China. I also present his views—interlaced with my ideas—on the major themes in revolutionary China, through my carefully preserved lecture notes.
While I and fellow graduate student, K.C. Brown, a dear friend from Charlotte, waited for Rittenberg’s arrival for the first lecture, we were aware that he did not possess a PhD degree although his memoirs, The Man Who Stayed Behind, published by Simon & Schuster just two years earlier in 1993 (and republished by Duke University Press in 2001), easily qualified as a doctoral dissertation as Rittenberg used a combination of personal memoir and confidential party documents. Soon the diminutive and sprightly seventy-four-year old professor arrived wearing a bomber jacket over his customary red plaid shirt. He removed his baseball cap and welcomed us students and proceeded to write the name of the course on the blackboard in Chinese: He was expert in the language.
Among the ranks of Western scholars and journalists that lived in China during the revolutionary years, Rittenberg occupies a special place alongside Anna Louise Strong and Edgar Snow, whose writings have enlightened generations of students of Chinese history.
Rittenberg was perfectly at home in the salubrious Carolinas. He was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1921, and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During the Second World War he trained with the U.S. Army in the Chinese language, and then worked at army headquarters in Shanghai in 1945. After the war, he immersed himself in the UN famine relief programme in China, and then stayed behind to train journalists and translate major political writings, including the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.
During his lectures he often kept himself out of the conversation, but we had already read his memoirs. His long association with the CCP began in Mao’s remote mountainous headquarters in the craggy caves of Yan’an, where he lived and often met the new Chinese leaders—Mao, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, and others. He knew Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Qing and the notorious “Gang of Four,” and the last emperor, Pu Yi.
At the CCP’s revolutionary base at Yan’an, Rittenberg witnessed at close quarters the Yan’an Rectification Movement that Mao conducted from 1942 to 1944. He watched Mao consolidate his supremacy within the party by launching a “thought-reform” campaign (in Chinese “washing the brain”), aimed largely at expunging Soviet influence.
Mao and the CCP found Rittenberg’s Chinese language skills very handy and had him interpret two messages for the United States from Mao. In those messages, Mao reached out to the U.S. government, stating that after the war ended in China Mao wanted to maintain a good relationship with the United States in order for American companies to invest in his country and to reduce dependence on the Soviet Union. The two messages reached the U.S. president, Harry Truman, who rebuffed the overtures. Rittenberg told us in one of his early lectures that if Truman had begun a dialogue with Mao, the Korean War and the Vietnam War may have been avoided. Eventually, the party used Rittenberg to translate some of Mao’s writings into English, and he went on to work for the Xinhua news agency and Radio Peking.
Despite his loyalty to the party, he was twice suddenly arrested and thrown into prison for a total of sixteen years, spending some of that time in solitary confinement. He first imprisonment in 1949 was on alleged charges of spying for a local spy ring connected with an international espionage network in the Soviet Union. In his memoirs, he relates that he was kept in a completely dark room for a year and detained for five years more before being released.
More recently, he came across a Soviet archival document showing that it was the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, who had “ordered” his imprisonment. In the document, Stalin instructs his minister of trade, Anastas Mikoyan, on February 4, 1949, to inform Mao about Rittenberg:[1]
We do not doubt that the American Rittenberg who works in the editorial office of the Central organ of the CC CCP [Central Committee, Chinese Communist Party] is a vicious American spy. We advise to arrest him immediately and, through him, to expose the network of American agents.
Rittenberg explained: “I always assumed—and I believe the Chinese Communist Party leaders also believed—that I was arrested in 1949 primarily as a close associate of U.S. writer and journalist Anna Louise Strong.” Chairman Mao had personally confirmed this in Shanghai in November 1965, when he expressed regret about her deportation from the Soviet Union in 1949 as an “American spy.” Rittenberg added: “Mao waved at me, and said to his Chinese colleagues, ‘And you involved him too, and he sat in the guard house.’” (“Guard house,” or ban fang, was a euphemism for prison).[2]
Soviet archival documents show that Stalin had demanded the arrest of Rittenberg prior to the deportation of Strong. Rittenberg explained: “In the mid-1980s Mao’s former secretary and Chinese Politburo member Hu Qiaomu was reported to have said that my arrest was not because of Strong, so it seems that he knew something that Mao chose to forget, although Mao’s memory for detail was phenomenal.” Rittenberg concluded: “It was, of course, only because Stalin was kind enough to die in 1953 that I was set free in 1955.”[3]
We would often talk about his imprisonment over dinner at his residence, prepared by his Chinese wife, Yulin, whom he had met and married during those tumultuous times. He harboured no bitterness or ill-feeling towards the Chinese leaders, the party, or towards those who had jailed him so unfairly.
Rittenberg delivering a speech in China during the revolutionary period. Photo by the courtesy of Sidney Rittenberg, from the documentary film, “The Revolutionary.”
Part of the reason for his incarceration was that during his three decade long stay in China, he exercised political agency as an influential participant in China’s domestic politics, often falling out with powerful officials. Despite harsh treatment, in later years he remained an ardent admirer of the rapid progress China had achieved.
Rittenberg (centre) in Beijing with his colleagues from China Radio International during the Great Leap Forward. Photo by the courtesy of China Pictorial.
Then came the Cultural Revolution. Rittenberg led the so-called “Norman Bethune Yan’an rebel group” in 1967, which staged political demonstrations at Radio Peking where he was the overall in-charge. Posters charging that he had seized control of the radio station appeared at the outlet’s office. He was arrested for his criticisms of the bureaucracy and accused of having links with the former Chinese president, Liu Shaoqi, considered the “Chinese Nikita Khrushchev.” Liu was being groomed by Mao as his successor, but he had antagonised Mao by opposing his policies, and would be purged from the party the following year.
Rittenberg with wife Yulin and children. Photo by the courtesy of China Pictorial.
In November 1977, Rittenberg was released from jail and rehabilitated. In March 1980, he returned to the United States with Yulin and their four children. He became a Distinguished Professor of Chinese History at his alma mater, UNC Chapel Hill.
“And what does our Southeast Asian friend have to say?” he often asked during lectures, referring to my status as a permanent resident of Singapore. My own views on the Chinese revolution did not resonate well with Rittenberg because I questioned whether the millions of people who died in Mao’s revolutions were worth the economic prosperity that China eventually attained. He responded: “Compare the economic success of China and India, in respect of which power has succeeded in benefiting the masses.”[4] In 1995, there was no question that China was far ahead of India in lifting millions out of poverty as its economy grew at breakneck speed.
The class of Spring 1995, with Rittenberg in checked shirt (front row, centre), and the author in red shirt (front row, second from left). Photo by the courtesy of Julie Mehta.
On the large questions of the Chinese civil war, his view was that the United States had badly miscalculated in its choice of backing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party which was eventually defeated, instead of forging an alliance with Mao’s CCP. “Mao privately said that he liked the U.S., but publicly he blasted it,” Rittenberg stated, pointing to the influence of a powerful and active China Lobby in the United States that continued backing the Nationalists after the Second World War.[5] “American intelligence was totally bought up by Chiang Kai-shek, who had wined and dined them. There were good intelligence people in the U.S. State Department, but many of them were purged because they told the truth. These people realised that it was possible to reach agreement with the Chinese communists,” he lectured.
From his base in Yan’an, Rittenberg observed that Mao wanted capitalism to coexist with farmers’ cooperatives and state-owned enterprises which could grow together. “The trouble was that the United States embargoed China, blocking it from trade and investments, and that forced China into the Soviet camp. China was, thus, left without a good economic model,” he said with a hint of sorrow.[6]
For Rittenberg, the criteria for judging whether Mao’s regime had succeeded was whether there was an improvement in standard of living, whether there was correct application of Marxism and intra-party democracy, and whether there was a sense of hope, and freedom of religion and belief. “Before Mao came to power, China could not build even a bicycle, and by the end of his era an industrial base had been built,” he stated.[7]
Rittenberg dwelt at length on Chiang’s and his Guomindang Party’s (GMD) defective military leadership, identifying his faults to his orientation as an ideological and political commander who caused severe problems for his ally, the U.S. General Joseph Stilwell. “Chiang was elitist and subjective and took military decisions based on political grounds, not tactical reasons,” he explained.[8]
The communist siege of the ancient capital, Loyang, was a case of Chiang’s flawed defense of his military headquarters in that city that fell to the People’s Liberation Army in March 1948. Chiang could not afford to lose Loyang, so he moved reinforcements over long distances, but this move was hazardous as the rail routes were controlled by the communists who mined the tracks to Loyang. Mao’s troops finally lured Chiang’s forces into a ravine and ambushed them there. “Chiang followed ‘Mao’s orders’ and fell into the trap,” Rittenberg explained.[9] A similar fate befell Chiang’s armies in other parts of the country. The difference between the foreign-educated Chiang and the Chinese-educated Mao was that the former was fighting for an important and glamorous agenda of controlling the big cities, whereas Mao believed in destroying the enemy’s forces wherever they were. The GMD eventually lost the war because it did not properly feed its troops or pay its troops as officers pocketed soldiers’ salaries. The communists, in contrast, gave enough food to their troops. The success of Mao was by default to a great extent because the GMD was so corrupt and inefficient. He studied the strengths of the GMD and addressed the communists’ weaknesses and became stronger than a depleted GMD.
Rittenberg began his lecture on February 2 with the prefatory comment that “the point of studying this topic was to see where Mao had arrived from in his life and where his perspectives came from.” The principal agenda of Mao’s republic was to eliminate poverty but twenty-five years after the founding of his republic there still were poor peasants. Mao led a poor country, and he had to borrow from economic systems that had succeeded. Yet, he spared no effort to enrich his country: He travelled into the villages to research and understand the problems of the people. He often declared that everybody should be a “renaissance man,” subjecting his senior bureaucrats to criticism from below to prevent them from becoming deadwood.[10]
Rittenberg argued that Mao really strove to build a democratic country within the parameters of centralised control. His party was created amid resistance from the peasants who did not know the communists. So, the communists had to earn their respect, going from door to door and working to help the peasants in their fields: Clearing grass, helping carry fertilizer, clearing pig droppings, digging wells. There was no question of the communists coercing the peasants; if the communists’ proselytizing had not been sincere the peasants would not have lent their support.
During the Great Leap Forward the peasants volunteered to work in development projects without coercion. Rittenberg recalled that the journalist, Dennis Bloodworth, noted this trend in the 1950s, commenting that it was scary to see peasants willingly working for the revolution that had been continuing since the birth of the PRC.[11]
The big debate after the Second World War was which way would China go? There were three forces in this debate: The GMD, the CCP, and a third force of about a dozen small political parties consisting of intellectuals and businessmen among which the best known was the Democratic League. The league wanted to follow a third road, neither communist nor nationalist, and a road where the smaller parties would have had a role. Both the GMD and the communists had armies, but the smaller parties did not. Rittenberg explained that though the third force had limited backing from the United States it never took off and most third force people joined Mao or Chiang. There were nine political parties in existence with offices in Beijing in 1995, “but they’re mainly there for window dressing,” he explained.[12] “All nine parties exist on the condition that they renounce any ambition to come to power. They’ve all done that. The tiger was, thus, defanged,” he declared with a flourish.
The GMD believed that China was still in a period of tutelage and hence unprepared for democracy: It wanted to steer the country from tutelage to constitutional government, and thence to democracy. The communists promised Mao’s “New Democracy,” consisting of the working classes, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie (small business owners), and the national bourgeoisie (large capitalists). Mao had said in 1944 and 1945 that after the war there would not be any dictatorship of the proletariat as had happened in Bolshevik Russia. To most Chinese, the GMD’s tutelage was less appealing than Mao’s New Democracy, Rittenberg declared.[13] There was a long debate within the CCP whether New Democracy was good or whether Stalin’s path was better.
In early 1952, Mao told his colleagues that what China really had was a dictatorship of the proletariat. The cat was out of the bag when the CCP announced this reality to the public the following year. New Democracy was nothing but a People’s Democratic Dictatorship. Why did the switch happen? Was Mao lying that it would not happen, and that he knew about it all along? Mao had empowered the people and they began taking matters into their own hands.
Why did it turn out that way? One of the major factors to influence China was the Korean War which broke out in 1950. It was traumatic and convinced Mao that class struggle was a reality. Before the Korean War, the entire Western world had slammed the door on Mao’s face, forcing him into an alliance with Stalin. It also meant that Mao had no economic model to follow except Stalin’s model. Mao, thus, adopted a modified version of Stalin’s centralised economy—with some exceptions which gave a lot more individual freedom in China. “Stalin hated peasants, but Mao loved them,” Rittenberg said.
The Chinese were terribly threatened by the Korean War, and they abandoned any dream of an alliance with the West. Mao claimed that he knew Kim Il-Sung was going to attack South Korea, though Mao never took Kim seriously. The Korean War pushed Mao into believing that class struggle was the only answer. Thus, class struggle replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat. The slamming of the Western door in his face pushed Mao into a corner. That was how Rittenberg saw it.
These trends set the political tone for land reforms in 1952 when the CCP would send student groups down to the villages to arouse the peasants to struggle against landlords. Often the struggles would get out of hand and landlords would be killed.
Mao then began his three socialist transformations. First, peasants were urged to pool their labour voluntarily. By 1954, many villages had created such low-level cooperatives. In a second move, the boundaries between family plots of land were removed, as private ownership came to an end. By 1958, communes were set up but there were no owners. Land was never nationalised; it belonged to the village, not the state.
Prosperity was elusive in the early years of the republic: The average farm family that Rittenberg observed would see meat on the table once a year at Chinese New Year when they would kill a pig. Slaughtering hogs was discouraged even at weddings, and simple vegetarian wedding meals were encouraged. Ordinary people ate millet, oats, and corn. The potato, Rittenberg explained, had a very low social standing. The people of the landlocked Shanxi province who loved their fries were derisively called “potatoes.”
The third transformation was of capitalist businessmen. In the early 1950s, Mao unleashed the first of his campaigns. The Three Antis and the Five Antis were an investigation of capitalists in factories, each one of whom ended up with a verdict. The propaganda emphasised that they were enemies of the people. They were told to embrace socialism, and eventually they owned no stakes in the companies they had set up originally.
Then Mao announced his Rectification Campaign in a bid to reunite with the people, which resulted in his policy, “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.” Mao declared that Marxism as a science was not afraid of opposition, so in May 1956 he told the party to expand the area of criticism in politics. For a few weeks, the press and radio ran critical comments of the party, and one report even warned that if the CCP leaders did not mend their ways, they would hang from lampposts, like the Hungarian communists. There were oblique criticisms of Mao as well, before the campaign was shut down.
The disaster of the Great Leap Forward caused Mao to recede from active political life. The Great Leap was an unmitigated disaster that took an enormous toll, both on human life and on the environment as trees were cut down to fuel steel furnaces. It was against this background that Mao voluntarily stepped down as head of state in December 1959, and his post was given to Liu Shaoqi. Mao still retained the more important post of party chairman but was no longer involved in the minutiae of party matters. When weighed against Mao’s overall contribution to the development of the Chinese nation, the failure of the Great Leap should be seen in a proper perspective, and not overemphasised.
The ramp up to the Cultural Revolution began in 1965, and it eventually broke out the following year. At this time, agriculture and industry had recovered from the ravages of the Great Leap, and diplomatic relations with Japan and Britain were improving. “Everything seemed to be fine when Mao overturned the whole thing and sparked the revolution,” Rittenberg said.[14]But why? Rittenberg’s view was that Mao decided—after the failure of the Great Leap—to take responsibility for its failure, and he demanded that the CCP central committee read out Mao’s self-criticism all over the country, but they never did it because many in the party did not think it was a good idea. Mao believed that his party colleagues could not keep up with his vision and he worried about how to keep China from stagnating. Rittenberg argued that Mao’s own political survival as a leader was linked to his ability to ensure economic success. Mao also worried about political succession, believing that the next generation would have to be created in the same way as the earlier one. Mao had not set up a powerful dictatorship like Stalin and could not get rid of some party leaders. The only way he could bring about change was to allow the masses to rise and produce a new leadership.
A related point is that this was “a revolution for the soul of man,” between the public and the private in people’s minds. Were people living for themselves or for the common good? This was the key question. Mao was confident that young people would carry out his will and serve as his supporters. Mao was the authority that gave licence to the people to attack every leader, except Mao. Rittenberg argued that Mao engineered the revolution primarily against senior leaders, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reform policies, Mao believed, would restore capitalism and destroy the revolution. Deng fell out with Mao and was purged during the Cultural Revolution.
The official view in China is that the cultural revolution was a disaster. Yet Rittenberg believed that had it not been for the cultural revolution, the economic opening of China would never have happened. The revolt simply blew the old system away.
What emerged was a new “dynasty.” Mao had headed the first-generation leadership. Deng now assumed charge of the second-generation leadership, and Jiang Zemin would lead the third. Mao rehabilitated Deng because Mao had always liked him. “Mao was never afraid of Deng, or that he would conspire against him,” Rittenberg explained.[15]
Deng demonstrated his military adventurism by launching a brief border with Vietnam in February and March 1979 to teach Hanoi a lesson for overthrowing the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia a month earlier. Rittenberg explained: “China felt they were the teachers and Vietnam the students, and so the Vietnamese would be pushovers. They were wrong. The Chinese had hoped to divert Vietnamese troops from Cambodia—this failed.”[16]The three-week long conflict, known as the Third Indochina War, ended with both sides claiming victory, but military experts believe Vietnam outperformed China on the battlefield. Deng’s intervention failed both militarily and strategically.
Deng now began suppressing democracy at home. “A campaign against corruption turned into a campaign against a campaign to expose corruption,” Rittenberg remarked.[17]“There is a Chinese saying: ‘you don’t get rewarded for not taking,’ that officials are using to get rich via corruption,” he said, referring to the prevalence of graft in the 1990s. In one anti-corruption sweep in the mid-1990s, of the thousands of people arrested, only one held the relatively high rank of a vice minister. “The accent was—as in Mao’s day—to protect the dictatorship.”
At this juncture, the shock of the Polish solidary movement, a workers’ rebellion, made the Chinese leadership very conscious not to allow a workers’ political movement to begin in China. That produced a split between those like the CCP general secretary, Hu Yaobang, who wanted political reform, and Deng.
Both Mao and Deng enunciated a set of criteria to differentiate what was right from what was wrong. Mao had his Six Points in his “Correct Handling of Contradictions” speech, and Deng had his “Four Cardinal Principles”: accepting the socialist road, accepting the people’s democratic dictatorship, accepting the leadership of the CCP, and accepting Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism-Leninism as guiding principles.
Deng may always have wanted to introduce economic reforms, but he could not ignore the clamour by farmers for liberalisation of agriculture. In Anhui province, farmers began banding together and signed secret pledges in 1978 to abolish collective ownership of land, and that each family would take back its share of land. Rittenberg explained that this arrangement forced reforms upon Deng. “The deal was signed by them blood. They did not know that many farmers in other parts of the country were doing the same thing,” he added.[18]At one point, Deng suggested legalising these deals, but the idea was shelved because Mao opposed it. Secret deals were also struck by farmers in Sichuan. “So what could Deng do? He could not use the army of peasants against 700 million farmers.”
Deng decided to de-collectivise the land and return it to the farmers, who were guaranteed fixed income if they sold their grain to the state, which led to spectacular growth in agriculture. Soon, farmers set up their own marketplaces along city streets. “And when the authorities chased them from one street, they moved to another street. Quickly, Deng realised that this market reform was also good.” Thus, state food enterprises went out of business.
The next thing Deng did was to reform industry which was under the State Planning Commission that told factories what they could produce and set their prices and hiring policies. Parallel to the SPC were the line ministries that owned all the factories. “In those days, while the SPC told factories what they could produce, the State Purchasing Agency bought all of the factories’ output. It was like robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Rittenberg commented.[19] Under the reforms, the line ministries were told to get out of business, and supervision of factories was shifted to the city governments. “Deng’s statement that some people would become rich faster than others ran in the face of communist tradition,” Rittenberg said.
The Chinese people had been disappointed three times in the Mao era, Rittenberg concluded.[20] Mao’s central idea was that in order to make a centrally controlled economy work, there had to be a unified ideology. First, during the period of liberation from 1949-1952, Mao promoted his “New Democracy” which he said was based on the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and Sun Yat-sen, and the Atlantic Charter. Intellectuals were shown respect, and land was given to the tiller. Mao had categorically said that he would not carry out the policy of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1953, the party announced that this was not the New Democracy, but rather it was the dictatorship of the proletariat. It said it would socialise industry and agriculture. Suddenly the peasants who had been given land began losing their land to the collectives. The belief now was that capitalism was bad and socialism was good. Mao had originally said that capitalism and socialism would coexist, but this was a volte-face.
The second great disappointment was the disaster of the Great Leap Forward that Mao imposed in order to overtake Britain and the United States in the production of steel. Rudimentary furnaces appeared in every backyard where people melted their pots and pans, and produced “black mud,” low quality steel that was unusable. Similar disaster visited agriculture as close planting of seeds led to mass failure of agriculture. Eventually, there was a massive famine. “The blame for the famine was placed on Khrushchev who had said China should first pay off its debt for weapons’ supplies in the Korean War,” Rittenberg explained.
The third great disappointment was the belief system that emerged during the Cultural Revolution. Mao had destroyed the party machinery during this revolution and had set up a propaganda cell to build his own personality cult to the extent that families had Mao’s portrait in their homes and asked him for directions on how to live their life. In reality, the instructions came from Mao’s Red Book. Those who questioned Mao were jailed. “A carpenter by mistake drove a nail through Mao’s eye while putting up a large Mao portrait, and he was jailed for a couple of years.”[21] At his last lecture in April, Rittenberg stated: “Mao used to preach that one should not be arrogant, but he himself became arrogant.”[22]
The one enduring memory that I have of Rittenberg is his camaraderie. He invited the entire class three times to his residence for a home cooked Chinese meal. We first visited the Rittenberg home at 620 Airport Road, Chapel Hill, on February 28 at 6 p.m. Rittenberg especially invited Julie. It was a large home in a leafy and wooded area. We met the delightful Yulin for the first time. She had prepared at least a dozen dishes which we savoured. Professor Rittenberg commented: “Who needs Western food when you have the great cuisines of China, and India.” Till the end, he remained close to Asia, ideologically and spiritually.
[1]“Cable, Joseph Stalin to Anastas Mikoyan,” February 4, 1949, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, provided to the National Security Archive/Svetlana Savranskaya by Sergo Mikoyan. With permission of the National Security Archive. Translated by Sergey Radchenko. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/121772. Also see, Sidney Rittenberg, “Sidney Rittenberg, Reacts to Soviet Evidence showing it was Stalin who ordered his Imprisonment,” The “Kindness” of Stalin, March 6, 2017, Woodrow Wilson, Cold War Project. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/the-kindness-stalin.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4]Sidney Rittenberg, “The China of Mao, the China of Deng,” Asian Studies, History, Spring 1995 (class lecture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, January 17, 1995).
[5]Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8]Ibid.
[9] Rittenberg (class lecture, January 24, 1995).
[10] Rittenberg (class lecture, February 2, 1995).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Rittenberg (class lecture, February 7, 1995).
[13] Ibid.
[14] Rittenberg (class lecture, February 13, 1995).
[15]Rittenberg (class lecture, March 20, 1995).
[16]Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Rittenberg (class lecture, March 21, 1995).
[19] Ibid.
[20] Rittenberg (class lecture, April 4, 1995).
[21] Ibid.
[22] Rittenberg (class lecture, April 25, 1995).