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Nien Cheng

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Nien Cheng


Born
in Peking (Beijing), China
January 28, 1915

Died
November 02, 2009

Genre


Nien Cheng is a Chinese American author who recounted her harrowing experiences of the Cultural Revolution in her memoir Life and Death in Shanghai. Cheng became a target of attack by Red Guards due to her management of a foreign firm in Shanghai, Shell. Maoist revolutionaries used this fact to claim that Cheng was a British spy in order to strike at Communist Party moderates for allowing the firm to operate in China after 1949. Her book documents her amazing courage and fortitude that enabled her to survive her imprisonment.

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 Maoist
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Average rating: 4.33 · 13,949 ratings · 1,198 reviews · 10 distinct worksSimilar authors
Life and Death in Shanghai

4.33 avg rating — 13,918 ratings — published 1986 — 3 editions
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Mao and China: A Legacy of ...

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3.73 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 1972 — 10 editions
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La dama de Shanghai

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating
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Life and Death in Shganghai

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating
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Life and Death in Shanghai 1

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Life and Death of Shanghai 2

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Life and Death in Shangai

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Life and Death in Shanghai,...

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Life and Death in Shangha-V1

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Quotes by Nien Cheng  (?)
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“It's always best to look ahead and not backwards. Possessions are not important. Think of those beautiful porcelain pieces I had. Before they came to me, they had all passed through the hands of many people, surviving wars and natural disasters. I got them only because someone else lost them. While I had them, I enjoyed them; now some other people will enjoy them. Life itself is transitory. Possessions are not important.”
Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai

“Justice? What is justice? It's a mere word. It's an abstract word with no universal meaning. To different classes of people, justice means different things.”
Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai

“I supposed the Red Guards had enjoyed themselves. Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal in each of us. If I were young and had had a working class background, if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infalliable, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?”
Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai