American translator who was a senior member of the Chinese Communist party and an adviser to Mao Zedong
Sidney Rittenberg, an
American from South Carolina, was one of the few non-Chinese people to become a senior member of the Chinese Communist party. Known in
China, and still revered, as Li Dunbai (which sounds like Rittenberg to Chinese ears), he was an active participant in the communist revolution of the late 1940s and its aftermath.
An intimate of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and almost every other veteran revolutionary, Rittenberg, who has died aged 98, gained prominence at the Broadcast Administration in
Beijing, one of the most important agencies of government, and for a few months in 1967 was the director of Radio Peking, on which he occasionally broadcast in his distinctive southern US accent.