Nien Cheng

Nien Cheng (born in Peking, 1915) is a Chinese-American author who recounted her harrowing experiences of the Cultural Revolution in her memoir Life and Death in Shanghai. Mrs. Cheng became a target of attack by Red Guards due to her management of a foreign firm in Shanghai. Maoist revolutionaries used this fact to claim that Mrs. Cheng was a British spy in order to strike at Communist Party moderates for allowing the firm to operate in China after 1949. Mrs. Cheng endured six-and-a-half years of squalid and inhumane conditions in prison, all the while refusing to give any false confession. Her daughter Meiping Cheng, a prominent Shanghai film actress, was murdered by Maoists after the young woman refused to denounce her mother. Mrs. Cheng was rehabilitated after the Gang of Four was arrested, and she used the opportunity to leave for the United States, as she was still a constant target of surveillance by those who wished her ill.