Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng

Nien Cheng was falsely accused of being a British spy in 1966 and imprisoned in solitary confinement for six and a half years. When the Communists gained control of China a new system of discrimination developed against the children of the educated and affluent, who found themselves handicapped because of their family background.

Meiping, a young actress in the Shanghai Film Studio, was an attractive and intelligent young woman who had learned from an early age that ‘the classless society of Communism had a more rigid class system than the despised capitalist society.’ For seventeen years Nien Chen had made an effort to make her home a haven for her daughter, Meiping, and herself, and managed to maintain their standard of living, ‘so that we could continue to enjoy good taste while the rest of the city was being taken over by proletarian realism.’ Up until the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party didn’t decree how people should live, but from time to time political campaigns rocked the country, and when people fell victim to these their incomes were drastically reduced or they and their families were relocated. In 1957 Nien Cheng’s husband died of cancer and she was asked to fill the position of assistant to the new general manager, becoming the only woman in Shanghai to occupy a senior role in a company that was acclaimed worldwide, a role she enjoyed until 1966. When the Communist Party entered Shanghai in 1949 he was asked to remain in office for the transitional period, after which he was allowed to leave and take on the position of general manager of the Shell International Petroleum Company based in Shanghai. She met her husband during this time and upon their return to China in 1939, he became a diplomatic officer in the Kuomintang Government.

Nien Cheng was born in Peking in 1915 and studied Economics in London in the mid-1930’s.

Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng