A Cultural Revolution Victim: Cheng Nien’s Transpacific Migration to the US

Focusing on Miss Nien Cheng’s transpacific immigration story, this article examines the meaning of U.S. citizenship for upper-class Chinese who became victims of political violence after the Cultural Revolution. In socialist China, an elite family background or overseas education was treated as inherent political guilt. Branded as “enemies of the people,” such individuals—and often their children—faced harsh persecution, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Nien Cheng (1915–2009), author of Life and Death in Shanghai, was one of them. The British-educated widow of a Chinese diplomat, Cheng later worked for Shell Oil in early Maoist Shanghai. Targeted as a “foreign spy” in 1966, she endured six and a half years of imprisonment and torture and ultimately lost her only daughter, while steadfastly denying all fabricated charges rooted in her class background.

After her release, Cheng emigrated to North America and became a U.S. citizen in 1988. As a survivor of the Cultural Revolution and a mother who lost her child, she offered a gendered critique of the patriarchal structures of the Maoist state and its persecution of the bourgeoisie. Drawing from her personal archive at Slippery Rock University, along with her memoir and contemporary newspaper reports, this research argues that the freedom and democracy represented by the United States were central reasons why victims like Cheng chose to leave China permanently and rebuild their lives in America. As an ethnic community, their endeavors and contributions further enriched the democratic fabric of the United States.