SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Sidney Rittenberg went to China as an American G.I. at the end of World War II and he fell in love with the country. He was discharged as a Chinese translator for the U.S. Army, but decided to stay in China. By the time he came back to the United States, more than 30 years later, he had become the only American citizen to join the Chinese Communist Party.

He translated English for Chairman Mao, told off Madame Mao during the Cultural Revolution, and endured 16 years of solitary confinement in Chinese prisons. He saw Chinese history unfold, from the founding of the People's Republic of China to the Great Leap Forward, great famines and the Cultural Revolution.

And now, Sidney Rittenberg advises U.S. corporations who want to do business in China. He is the subject of a new documentary, "The Revolutionary." He joins us from member station KPLU in Tacoma, Washington. Mr. Rittenberg, thanks so much for being with us.

SIDNEY RITTENBERG: It's so great to be here with you, Scott.

SIMON: You know, I think the only other person that I could imagine asking this question of would be Henry Kissinger. I don't get to ask this question a lot. What was Mao really like?

RITTENBERG: He was a rather aloof, slow-moving, slow-talking person. When we would play Chinese gin rummy together with Zhou Enlai and Hu Sarti(ph) and the other leaders, they would all tease each other and cuff each other around, but he would sit there paying attention to his cards and they would not pull him into that kind of camaraderie. He was a bit aloof.

SIMON: You refer to him in the film as both a great hero and a great criminal.

RITTENBERG: Right.

SIMON: Help us understand how he went between both of those.

RITTENBERG: You know, he was, in a sense, the George Washington of modern China. He pulled a nation together and started China on a path of industry development and so on. Criminal, because after coming into power, he felt that he had the right to launch these tremendous social experiments that messed up the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

He took the lid off of society, let the cauldron boil to see what was going to happen when he, himself, did not know what the outcome was going to be.

SIMON: A few years after you joined the Chinese Communist Party, you wound up being put in solitary confinement for six years. You were accused of being a foreign spy.

RITTENBERG: Right.

SIMON: Now that you are safely out, were you in any way a spy?

RITTENBERG: No, not at all. I was a complete sympathizer and participant.

SIMON: So how did it wind up that you were thrown into prison, and what does it say about that regime that you were thrown into prison?

RITTENBERG: Well, under that sort of system, there is nobody that is ever really safe because they don't have the understanding that if each person is not secured under the law, then nobody is really secure.

SIMON: Mr. Rittenberg, I have to ask this. I mean, all those years you never gave up your U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of China, right?

SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Right.

SIMON: Although you joined the Chinese Communist Party.

RITTENBERG: Right.

SIMON: Were you a traitor to the United States?

RITTENBERG: Oh, no, not at all. On the contrary. The reason that I wore Western clothes and kept my citizenship and so on was I wanted it to be clear that I was representing what I consider the best traditions and the best interest of the American people.

SIMON: You still visit China quite a bit.

RITTENBERG: We do.

SIMON: Help us understand the China that we see now.

RITTENBERG: The China that we see now, I think, is an exclamation point followed by a question mark. Exclamation, because the enormous growth in the last 30 years since the reforms and the opening. They have lifted 4 or 500 million people out of pauperdom. The question mark, because where do we go from here? Not too clear. Everyone seems to agree that we talk to in China, that now there must be further reforms, particularly political reform.

So how much of an impact are the new leaders going be able to make? How much are they going to be able to do in loosening controls on the press? How much are they going to be able to do in protecting whistleblowers from retaliation? My own guess is that there will be some incremental progress on these issues, but I think it'll be quite a long time before there's more substantial progress and change.

SIMON: Sidney Rittenberg, the only U.S. citizen to join the Chinese Communist Party and he is the subject of a new documentary called "The Revolutionary." Mr. Rittenberg, thank you so much.

RITTENBERG: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.