Life and Death in Shanghai

Years after escaping first to Canada and then to the US, author Nien Cheng (the pen name of Yao Nien-Yuan) published her autobiography about life under the communist regime in China, Life and Death in Shanghai. This memoir focuses on Cheng’s own steely resolve to withstand abuse, torture, six years of solitary confinement, and a variety of other seemingly unbearable circumstances, as well as giving a broader overview of the way powershifts within the party led to the tremendous destruction of the Cultural Revolution. Published in 1987, Life and Death in Shanghai is an unflinching look at a time when revolutionary fervor strove to completely destroy the heritage and history of one of the world’s civilizations.

After the complete economic failure of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Mao was worried that his top place within the Communist Party of China was about to be overtaken. To cement his authoritarian rule, he authorized his wife and three other top officials (known as the Gang of Four) to start the Cultural Revolution, an effort to destroy and eradicate anything connected to the West, to the past, to education, or to even a hint of free thought. Gangs of teenagers, called the Red Guards, were deputized to destroy everything and round up everyone that they believed went against the communist ideals of the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard had free reign to humiliate, beat up, terrorize, imprison, and kill as they saw fit.

In 1966, Nien Cheng became their target. The privileged widow of a man who had worked for the government of Chiang Kai-Shek (the regime in power before the communists), Cheng had been educated in London and was an employee of the multinational company Shell Oil. Although previously this job was sanctioned by the Communist Party themselves, during the upheaval that the Cultural Revolution brought, everything and everyone was fair game.



When the Red Guards descended on her Beijing home, Cheng describes in detail the way they took pleasure in smashing to pieces her collections of antique porcelain and jade. Although the long list of the treasures destroyed can’t help but mark just how high a position the author had occupied before her downfall, the image of thugs taking down a 50-year-old defenseless woman is shocking.

Cheng was immediately imprisoned, accused of being an imperialist spy – with the evidence being her work for Shell. Never losing her own sense of self, Cheng refused to admit she had done anything wrong and to gratify her false accusers with self-incrimination. When her false confession was not forthcoming, she was periodically tortured and put into solitary confinement for six years. The conditions of her imprisonment were as stark as we can imagine, and she faced physical privation, psychological deterioration, and was continuously plagued with anxiety over the fate of her daughter, Meiping, who had had dreams of becoming an actress.

Unable to break Cheng’s will, the Chinese government eventually released her from jail in 1973, with a claim that her incorrect imperialist attitude was now better. Cheng found that her worries about her daughter were not misplaced. Because Meiping had refused to denounce her mother as a spy, she had been beaten to death, and this murder had been covered up as a suicide, although the circumstances of the death make it clear that this was implausible.



Cheng settled into a two-room apartment to try to live a quiet life. Nevertheless, she was always under constant surveillance, both from government officials and from the downstairs neighbors, and even from some of her own family members. As Cheng makes clear, in an authoritarian regime that tries to police the thoughts of all of its citizens, all trust is eroded, everyone wears a mask at all times, and relationships become hard to sustain.

Eventually, in 1980, after the fluctuations in Chinese political life had calmed somewhat, Cheng was able to receive a visa to come to the United States to visit her family. As soon as she did, she applied for asylum and never returned to China. Cheng poignantly describes the differences between her new life in Washington DC and her old one in Beijing, rebuking Americans who take for granted the freedoms and possibilities of life in the West. Commenting on the process of writing her autobiography, Cheng confides that writing about her persecution, torture, and imprisonment has been so re-traumatizing that she was only able to write the autobiography in brief spurts.

The autobiography was widely praised upon publication. Because of her spare, dry, journalistic prose, Cheng’s story is even more powerful than it would have been if she had suffused it with a wealth of emotion. Instead, it reads like a memoir of battle. Writing for the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said that the book is “Far from depressing, it is almost exhilarating.” Echoing the sentiment, Stanley Karnow wrote in The Washington Post that the book “exalts the triumph of the human spirit over mindless inhumanity…Thus her narrative deserves to rank with the foremost prison diaries of our time.”