Sidney Rittenberg film and skype interview at UCB/BAM/PFA.

Da Shan is one of the most celebrated foreigners in China, as he is known by millions of viewers for years for his role on tv,  Canada apointed him director of their Expo pavilion in 2010.  I met him at the FCC; he was very personable.but his persona is benign  It is amazing that Rittenberg was never considered a traitor, having become a member of the Communist party, when a GI about ready to return to America.  He insisted:  I wanted to play a role in history; I wanted to be somebody who did that, and that is what I did.  He knew Sidney Epstein, the journalist and his wife in Beijing.  He wanted to be a part of history and to be a revolutionary, he reiterates, --for which he spent 15 years in prison, in solitary confinement. Joseph Stalin told Mao that Rittenberg had to be an operative for the CIA and that he should be imprisoned the first time, when he remained there for six years.  The second time Mao imprisoned him, again, for a decade.  It's difficult to write about this.   Bruce Pickering introduced the film maker and the film, which is forbidden to be shown in China, but had viewings in the FCC in Shanghai(to which I was invited) and in Beijing and HK. 
The filmmaker feels, like I, the more things appear to change in China, the more they stay the same, that it is systemic. 

A Chinese wife married to a foreign man sat next to me, and she had the first question; with the current autocratic situation in China, what does he think of the people's situation? One asked him about his children: one is an engineer, another a doctor, another has a consulting company, in which he and his wife both work, consulting with US businesses in China.

It reminded me strangely of "the Manchurian Candidate".