Nien cheng interview

Nien cheng daughter

Cheng was born into a rich landowning family in Beijing. She returned to China after graduation. The couple lived in Australia briefly, setting up an embassy there, [ 6 ] and eventually moved to Shanghai. After the Chinese Communist Party came to power in , Kang-chi Cheng served at Shell 's office in Shanghai until his death from cancer in Nien Cheng then joined the company as an adviser.

In , Cheng was targeted by the Red Guards and accused of being a British spy, as she was both Western-educated and the widow of a former manager of a foreign firm in Shanghai. Cheng's memoir documents her account of her subsequent confinement, which lasted for over six years. She managed to endure the tortures and abuses inflicted by the interrogators and never made any false confessions or perjuries.

Cheng cited Mao Zedong 's teachings to counter her interrogators, frequently turning the tide of the struggle sessions against them. Although the living conditions at the detention house were inhumanly squalid, Cheng still tried to maintain her dignity and keep her appearance decent. In , when offered parole on the basis that her attitude had shown improvement, Cheng resisted leaving the detention house without first receiving official acknowledgment from her captors that she had been unjustly detained.

Upon her release, Cheng was relocated from her spacious home to two bedrooms on the second floor of a two-story building. Cheng continued her life under constant surveillance, including spying by the family on the first floor. After Cheng conducted a discreet investigation, she found that this scenario was impossible, and she came to believe that Meiping had been murdered by Maoists after she refused to denounce her mother.

The alleged killer of Meiping, a rebel worker named Hu Yongnian, was arrested and given a suspended death sentence by Shanghai authorities in , but he was eventually paroled in Cheng lived in China until Using funds that her husband had placed in overseas bank accounts, she first emigrated to Canada and later to Washington, D.