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Nien Cheng, who died on November 2 aged 94, dispassionately revealed the horrors of China’s Cultural Revolution in her memoirs, Life and Death in Shanghai.
Published: 4:41PM GMT 11 Nov 2009
On August 30 1966, between 30 and 40 high school students, wearing Red Guard armbands, arrived at the gates of her elegant house in Shanghai to “take up revolutionary action” against her. As the wealthy widow of the former general manager of the Shell oil company in the city, Nien Cheng had been expecting the visit.
The youngsters, seized with Maoist fervour, smashed her antique furniture and porcelain, destroyed her paintings and burned her books. When she tried to save some irreplaceable items she was kicked in the ribs. “They are the useless toys of the feudal emperors and the modern capitalist class and have no significance to us, the proletarian class,” she was told.
The visit was the beginning of an excruciating six-and-a-half years of torture, during which Nien Cheng was falsely accused of being a spy and kept in solitary confinement in Shanghai’s No 1 Detention House. During her captivity, her only daughter, Meiping, an actress in revolutionary propaganda, was beaten to death by Red Guards.
Succumbing to pneumonia and blood haemorrhages, Nien Cheng lost her teeth; and the tightness of her handcuffs made her fear that she would also lose her hands. But she remained defiant, earnestly studying the writings of Mao Tse-tung and turning their logic against her captors. In plain and compelling detail, Nien Cheng’s 1987 book describes her interrogations as contests of will, as she refused to make a false confession and responded with quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book.
Her incarceration coincided with a power struggle at the top of the Communist Party which pitted Mao and his revolutionary guards against more moderate forces, including Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, who favoured economic liberalisation.
In the first year of her imprisonment, Red Guards loyal to Mao overthrew the local government in Shanghai, and long-trusted party leaders were suddenly denounced as “hidden enemies” working to revive capitalism. As the two sides struggled for control, Shanghai, and even the prison in which Nien Cheng was being held, descended into chaos. “One day, I read a newspaper article entitled: ‘It’s an honour to have our hands stained with the enemy’s blood,’” Nien Cheng recorded.
Only years later, as she pieced together the intrigue of the Revolution, did it become clear that a confession from her that Shell had been spying was intended as part of a power play against the prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who had personally sanctioned the company’s operations.
Born on January 28 1915 in Beijing, Nien Cheng was the daughter of a wealthy land owner. After studying at Yanjing University in Shandong province, Nien Cheng attended the London School of Economics in 1935 at the insistence of her father, an Anglophile. Her tutor there could not pronounce her full name, Yao Nien Yuan, and she shortened it to Nien.
In London she met her husband, Kang-chi Cheng, and converted to Christianity. Upon their return to China, he joined the Foreign Affairs ministry of the Nationalist government and was eventually transferred to Shanghai. When the communists came to power, they allowed him to become the head of Shell until his death from cancer in 1957. Nien Cheng then joined the company as an adviser.
After her years in prison, she was told on March 27 1973 that she was being released owing to an “improvement in her way of thinking and an attitude of repentance”.
She refused to leave, demanding that officials declare her innocent and publish an apology in a newspaper. “The No 1 Detention House isn’t an old people’s home. You can’t stay here all your life,” her interrogator told her.
Nien Cheng spent the last years of her life in Washington DC. When she arrived in the United States in 1980, using money her husband had left in overseas bank accounts, she was told she would not be admitted unless she claimed political asylum, something she refused to do. She travelled to Canada and remained there until she was admitted as an immigrant in 1983.
Her book, which emerged four years later, became an instant best-seller, capturing the public imagination as communism showed signs of failure. She was seated next to President Ronald Reagan at a White House state banquet in 1987, and excerpts from her book were published at length in Time magazine. “Her narrative deserves to rank with the foremost prison diaries of our time,” wrote Stanley Karnow, the author, in the Washington Post.
Nien Cheng died of renal failure, a condition of which she had been aware of since the removal, in her youth, of one of her kidneys. She had no immediate family.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/6545847/Nien-Cheng.html