In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a group of foreigners who, dissatisfied with the reality in their home countries and compelled by the illusion concocted by Marxist-Leninist ideology, joined the Communist Party and then, with longing, either went to the Soviet Union or came to China, sparing no effort to propagate for the Communist revolution. Some of them became the guests of the Communist Party, such as the American journalists Strang and Snow; some of them were once very popular and had encounters with many leaders of the Communist Party, but were imprisoned under the suspicion of the Communist Party, such as the main character of this article, the American Li Dunbai.
The sad thing is that after these foreigners saw the leaders they once knew were beaten one by one in the Cultural Revolution and even suffered misfortune themselves, they criticized, but many of them still did not see through the nature of the Communist Party and still helped the CCP in the international community. Li Dunbai is also one of them. Let’s follow Li Dunbai’s oral history into his past years.
Joining the Communist Party of the United States to China
Born in 1921 in Charleston, South Carolina, to a middle-class family, his grandfather was a state legislator and his father was a lawyer and acting mayor. His grandfather was Russian and had fought in the Russian Revolution, and at the age of 13 he saw the injustice done to blacks by whites and had the idea of finding a place where justice could be done.
At that time, Lee’s grandfather used to entertain guests at his home, including Communists, and later the local Communist Party organization began to send Lee’s family Communist propaganda materials, which Lee read a lot. After graduating from high school, Lee went to the University of North Carolina and became a member of the Communist Party of America underground, participating in some of its activities, such as propaganda work.
After the outbreak of World War II, the Communist Party of the United States was strongly anti-war, considering it “a war between imperialist countries,” but changed its attitude after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. After the Japanese raid on the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor, Li Dunbai also enlisted in the army, and later went to Stanford University for training and studying Chinese. Influenced by Snow’s “A Journey to the West,” many people in the training class at the time leaned left and had a favorable view of the Communist Party.
In 1945, Li Dunbai had just arrived in Kunming, China, when Japan surrendered. In Kunming, he contacted the Chinese Communist Party underground. The head of the underground party suggested that he go to Yan’an because Mao was learning English, but there were no good English teachers. If Li Dunbai went, he could engage in this work. They also described to him the “beauty” of Yan’an, which made Li Dunbai very eager. It was at this time that the owner of the local enlightened bookstore gave him the Chinese name Li Dunbai, which means “generous and kind” with the word “dun” in the middle of “Li Bai”.
However, Li Dunbai had already received his discharge orders, but after applying, he temporarily remained in China and was transferred to the U.S. Army Headquarters in Shanghai. In Shanghai, he was introduced to Song Qingling by Liao Meng-sheng, who was then the secretary of Song Qingling, whom he met through internal Chinese Communist Party connections. Song Qingling was a secret member of the Communist International. Three months later, with the help of Song Qingling, Li Dunbai was appointed as an inspector at the United Nations Relief Administration to supervise the distribution of relief supplies. During this period, he met Wang Zhen, Zhou Enlai and other senior Communist Party officials, and told the Communist Party about the information he received from the Americans that “the United States was supporting the Kuomintang in destroying the Communist Party in the Northeast”, which was the main reason for his acceptance by Yan’an.
Sun Yuanliang, a senior KMT general, later concluded that it was the American “spy” Li Dunbai who “stole confidential information from the American head of the Military Investigation Department and saved Li Xiannian’s troops from being besieged by the Nationalist Army”.
In 1946, with Zhou’s introduction, Li Dunbai left the United Nations and began his journey to Yan’an. While in Zhangjiakou, Nie Rongzhen, who was stationed here, left him behind to proofread and embellish spoken English broadcasts for the United States. After doing this for a while, in October, Li Dunbai was transferred by the Chinese Communist Party to work for the Xinhua News Agency in Yan’an. Upon his arrival in Yan’an, Li Dunbai volunteered to join the CCP, which was quickly approved jointly by Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Ren Bishi. However, he did not renounce his American citizenship, as several other foreigners did, and it can be said that he was one of the few foreign members of the CCP.
Befriending Wang Guangmei in Yan’an
Li Dunbai recalls that before he left for Yan’an in the summer of 1946, he met Wang Guangmei, a recent graduate of Fu Jen Catholic University in Beiping, at the time 24 years old and the English secretary of Ye Jianying, the then chief representative of the CPC in the Military Adjustment Department, at the Executive Department of the Military Adjustment Office in Beiping.
Not long after Li Dunbai’s arrival in Yan’an, the civil war broke out and Wang Guangmei withdrew to Yan’an with the Chinese delegation of the MID. Dr. Ma Hyde, also from the United States, and his Chinese wife Sophie, tried to set the two up, but after they met for a meal each at a restaurant, they decided it was better to be ordinary friends.
Later, Wang Guangmei became Liu Shaoqi’s wife, and eating potted meat with Wang Guangmei became one of Li Dunbai’s sins during the Cultural Revolution.
He was drugged and spent six years in a Communist prison
In late February 1949, Li Dunbai received an order signed by Liu Shaoqi from his immediate superior, Liao Chengzhi, then president of the Xinhua News Agency, to go to Beiping, which had just been occupied by the Chinese Communist Party, with Shi Zhe (Mao’s political secretary and Russian translator), on a “special mission”. Li Dunbai was very excited about the possibility of assuming the historic responsibility of diplomatic communication between the new Communist regime and the United States.
However, Li was “tricked” into being arrested in a village in Dongpaipo. Several soldiers stripped him of his clothes, and one even opened his mouth to examine him. Li Dunbai was so confused that he cried. He was then asked to give an account of his secret service connections. However, after several weeks of interrogation, he did not give any explanation.
At that time, the room in which Li Dunbai was held was very small, with a large part of it occupied by a dirt bed, and the remaining space was only three or four steps away, and the windows were boarded up. The interrogation was full of fear, threats and intimidation.
According to Li Dunbai’s recollection, he was wavering in his thinking, thinking at one time that they had made a mistake, and at another time that they were testing themselves, because almost all of his friends and acquaintances from the Xinhua News Agency had been rectified during the Yan’an Rectification Movement, and some of them had nervous breakdowns, and some were afraid of everything with fear. Li Dunbai also said to himself that they were mistaken, and he could not blame the CCP. In the midst of repeated wavering, Li made up a fake surrender, but was “recognized”. In the midst of the agony and tension, the CCP gave Li Dunbai some small white pills to take, and poured them in if he didn’t eat them. Li Dunbai had hallucinations and even suffocated. Later, he learned that the effect of this medicine was to stimulate the nerves, making people nervous and sleepless.
In the midst of mental agony, Li Dunbai was taken to Beijing and imprisoned in Beijing Prison No. 2. This imprisonment lasted for more than six years.
At the end of 1949 or in the spring of 1950, Li Dunbai saw the news of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in the newspaper in the window of his cell, and he felt better. From then on, he began to read books and newspapers to take his mind off his pain. It was also during this prison term that his first wife, Wei Lin, divorced him.
Years later, Li Dunbai learned that he had been implicated in the so-called “American secret agent” case against Anna-Louise Strong, a well-known left-wing journalist and writer who had been identified by the Soviets and imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party due to continued pressure from Stalin.
After Stalin’s death, changes occurred within the Soviet party, and the Communist Party released Li Dunbai from prison in April 1955. At this time, Li Dunbai did not know whether he really felt the slightest bit of resentment toward the CCP, as he wrote, but believed himself to be “a tried and true, standard Communist”, despite the fact that his wife had left him, and despite the fact that his eyesight had deteriorated as a result of the torture he had endured in prison.
Nearly ten more years in Communist prison
After his release from prison, Li Dunbai went to work for a radio station. Soon after, he married his second wife, Wang Yulin. But his first time in prison left him with an after-effect of panic. It means that at some point, suddenly, he would get sweaty, panicky, nervous and very scared.
When Strang settled in China in 1958, he received preferential treatment from the Communist Party’s top brass. As Strang regarded Li Dunbai as his son, he was a fish out of water in the political arena and was trusted by the Chinese Communist Party, and participated in the translation of the English translation of Mao’s Selected Works. Mao invited him and other foreign experts to Zhongnanhai, and Li and his wife were also invited to Mao’s birthday, and Mao signed the “Red Book” for him at the “National Day” ceremony in 1966. In his own words, it was the “golden decade” of his life.
After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Li Dunbai became a rebel in the Broadcasting Bureau and gave speeches in Tiananmen Square, and even became the head of a three-member leadership group. On February 21, 1968, Li was arrested again and put in Qincheng prison, where he became an “American agent” and was questioned about his relationship with Wang Guangmei, saying that he had developed Wang Guangmei to join the CIA, and later Wang Guangmei developed Liu Shaoqi and so on.
Later he heard that his arrest warrant was signed by thirteen leaders of the Central Committee, including Zhou Enlai, and was officially qualified as “being involved in the counter-revolutionary group of Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu”. This may be related to Li’s radical behavior at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when he became the leader of the rebellion in the Broadcasting Bureau he worked for, and once became “popular” in China. However, Li himself believes that he lost his power because he inadvertently offended Jiang Qing, even though he had wholeheartedly approved of the mass democracy of the Cultural Revolution from the beginning and believed that Jiang Qing was the true representative of the revolutionary drive.
During his nearly ten years in prison, Li Dunbai did not go crazy, thanks to the fact that he was no longer under the illusion of a “test”, thanks to the fact that he was ready to be released one day, and thanks to his mentality of “living one day to live an interesting life”. It seems that all the ideas of the Communist Party are useless in this environment. However, during his second time in prison, Li Dunbai’s panic syndrome still appeared at times.
Interestingly, during Li’s last year in Qincheng Prison, Jiang Qing also came in and was locked up across the hall from his cell. He heard her noisy voice and knew he would be released, but did not know when.
Released to the United States
On November 19, 1977, Li Dunbai was finally released from prison. It was five years later that the Chinese Ministry of Public Security issued a document officially “rehabilitating” her wrongful conviction as a “secret agent” and “active counter-revolutionary activity.
After his release from prison, Li Dunbai returned to work for Xinhua News Agency and found that the “socialism” he had been “defending” was no longer there. For example, people began to “look at money” more and more, for example, the issue of “surname of society and surname of capital” was no longer discussed in newspapers. He was dissatisfied with Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policy, and decided to return to the United States. At that time, Li Dunbai was still six months away from turning 60.
In 1981, when Wallace, a famous American journalist, came to China for an interview, Li Dunbai, as a translator, helped Wallace solve the problem of Chinese people asking for money, and Wallace used his influence in the U.S. to provide many new opportunities for Li Dunbai, who started with nothing.
Later, Li Dunbai opened a consulting firm in the United States and was associated with the American upper class, such as President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Kissinger, with the goal of helping the Chinese Communist Party develop its economy. When senior Chinese officials such as Wang Zhen and Li Xiannian went to the United States, Li Dunbai attended the welcoming ceremony and even accompanied them personally. He also brokered a deal for Wallace to interview Deng Xiaoping.
Family influences
Li Dunbai had four children, one boy and three girls. His son, Li Xiaoming, recounts in “My Father’s “Spy” Influence on My Life” that he was rehabilitated through labor with his mother at the age of five and lived under the shadow of “my father was an American spy” from the time he could remember.
When she and her mother worked at the May 7 Cadre School in Henan, Li has a deep memory of “burning bricks”: “Except for working in the fields, people there spent most of their time burning bricks. The brick kiln was built on a small slope, and some people carried the bricks on their backs, while others pushed them with a wheelbarrow. My mother had to carry 40 bricks at a time, and I helped the others push the bricks.” When he reached elementary school age, Li was assigned to raise pigs again. Every morning at 5:00 a.m., he would go to the canteen and carry the leftovers from the previous day in a bucket to the pig pen to feed the pigs. Because he was the child of an “American agent”, Li was rejected by children of his own age. Even in the cadet school, the other children did not want to be “in the same boat” as Li Xiaoming.
In 1973, after a year and a half at the cadet school, Li left his mother, who remained at the cadet school to be rehabilitated, and returned to Beijing to attend first grade at Yumin Elementary School, where his grandmother took care of him and his three sisters. They lived in a small dormitory in the Broadcasting Bureau.
When he was in elementary school, he was asked to leave the classroom whenever there was a broadcast of Mao’s speech at school. The reason: he was not qualified to listen to Mao’s speeches. So, no matter in spring, summer, autumn or winter, Li Xiaoming would appear on the playground. He stood alone, not angry, and did not leave. Li had long been used to such injustice, and even when other children bullied him, he did not fight back. At that time, he “especially hated, hated that the other half of his blood was American.” From other people’s comments, Li’s initial impression of his father was that he was “an American agent who had been arrested and didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.”
After Li Dunbai’s release from prison, the family’s quality of life improved significantly. At the Friendship Hotel, Li’s family lived in three separate apartments. “Mom and dad lived in one set, my grandma and I lived in one set, and my sisters lived in one set.” That’s when Li began to learn from his sisters how privileged the family’s life once was.
Later, at the age of 15, Li went to high school in the United States, went to college to study film production, and after graduation, worked in advertising photography. In his eyes, his father was “more communist than the Communist Party”.
Recent Comments