Yale-in-China was not the only foreign benefactor of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader, however. Others included those who lived in and worked for the Communists in China: Grigorii Voitinski (born as Grigorii Naumovitch Zarkhin, leading Soviet Comintern emissary, “encouraged a group of [Chinese] intellectuals to establish the CCP, in secret”), Michail Borodin (born Mikhail Markovich Gruzenberg, leading Soviet Comintern emissary), Adolph Abramovich Joffe (Comintern emissary, Soviet ambassador to the official government in Beijing, 1922-1924), Pavel Mif (Comintern emissary, who also worked at the Foreign Languages Institute), Vladimir Abramovich Neumann (born Vladimir Abramovich Nieman, Comintern emissary), Boris Zakharovich Shumiatsky (Comintern emissary), David Crook (worked at the Foreign Languages Institute), Sidney Rittenberg (first American to become a CCP member, discussed below), Israel Epstein (editor-in-chief of China Reconstructs and member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference), Sidney Shapiro (worked at the Bureau of Cultural Relations with the Foreign Countries and the Foreign Languages Press), Solomon Adler (co-translator of Mao’s Collected Works into English), Sam Ginsbourg (worked on the translation of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung), and Michael Shapiro (co-translator of Mao’s Collected Works into English). Of special interest for our purposes is Sidney Rittenberg. Rittenberg represents what I have called a subversive elite. In an extensive obituary for The New York Times in 2019, Robert McFadden tells how Rittenberg became an intimate of Mao and a legendary figure in the Chinese Communist Party.12 Born to a prominent South Carolinian family, Rittenberg joined the American Communist Party in 1940, at age 19. Drafted into the military, he was forced to relinquish his party membership, and was trained in foreign languages at Stanford University. In his first (and last) U.S. military assignment, Rittenberg was sent to China to serve as a linguist for the Judge Advocate General. Upon his discharge in 1946, Rittenberg joined a United Nations relief agency in Shanghai, where he met Communists who convinced him to join their movement. He undertook his own 45-day “long march” to Yan’an, where he met Mao in a mountain military sanctuary and became a member of the CCP, with Mao’s explicit endorsement. A translator of news dispatches for the party’s propaganda arm and an interpreter of Chinese for communiqués with international leaders, Rittenberg later became the head of China’s Broadcast Administration (Radio Beijing). As a leading propagandist, he promoted and glorified the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution: "Mr. Rittenberg was an avid propagandist during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a campaign from 1958 to 1961 to transform China from an industrialized society…He was even more directly involved in the early stages of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a decade-long purge of “bourgeois” intellectuals, party officials and others suspected of anti-Maoist thought. Starting in 1966, thousands of young Red Guards persecuted millions with imprisonment, torture, public humiliation and property seizures in struggles to create a Maoist cult of personality. Mr. Rittenberg joined the Red Guards in denouncing what they called “establishment” bureaucrats and haranguing the masses. His speeches and news conferences were published in the Red Guard newspapers. One famous picture from the era shows Mao autographing Mr. Rittenberg’s copy of his “Little Red Book” of sayings. Another shows Mr. Rittenberg on a speaker’s platform, holding the book up and exhorting crowds in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to defend Mao’s thoughts." After serving a second prison sentence in China on the false charge of being a spy, Rittenberg, who still believed in the revolution, returned to the U.S. in 1979. He soon monetized his knowledge of the Chinese communist culture and the business community and helped Western corporations, especially Big Tech firms, to cash in on socialism with Chinese characteristics (or capitalism with Chinese characteristics).14As such, he contributed to China’s developing market economy while subverting elements of the U.S. business establishment, especially the technology sector, which became beholden to the ideologically communist country. But I digress.