Nien Cheng

Nien Cheng (Chinese: 鄭 念; pinyin: Zhèng Niàn; born January 28, 1915 in Beijing ; † November 2, 2009 in Washington, DC ) was a Chinese- born American author .

Life

Cheng studied at the London School of Economics from 1935 to 1938 . Cheng was married to a Kuomintang diplomat, head of the Shanghai Office of the Foreign Ministry and later director of Shell's Shanghai branch , with whom she lived in Canberra , the capital of Australia , from 1941 to 1948 . After the death of her husband, she managed the Shell branch until it was forcibly closed.

When Mao Zedong initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966 , she was a target of the Red Guards and was eventually taken to the No. 1 State Prison, where she was subjected to six and a half years of inhuman and degrading treatment, on charges of maintaining contact with alleged British spies . However, she withstood all threats to the point of death and refused to agree to false allegations. After the fall of the so-called Gang of Four , which included Mao Zedong's fourth wife Jiang Qing , she was rehabilitated. She has now also learned that her daughter Meiping Cheng, who worked as an actress in Shanghai, had been killed for refusing to incriminate her mother.

In 1980, Nien Cheng left the People's Republic of China because she was still exposed to hostility there and settled in the USA. In 1986 her book Life and Death in Shanghai was published , in which she recorded her experiences during her imprisonment and provided an insight into what went on during the Cultural Revolution and into its repressive methods.

Works

• Life and Death in Shanghai. Grafton Books, London 1986.
  • German by Hans-Joachim Maas: Life and Death in Shanghai. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-550-07992-3 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Nien Cheng in the catalog of the German National Library