A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

News quickly becomes history, and over the years TIME has tried to capture / historical perspective through the recollections of noteworthy figures who influence the events we report. Among the authors whose chronicles have appeared in these pages: Anwar Sadat, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Alexander Haig and Dissident Elena Bonner, the wife of Physicist Andrei Sakharov. This week TIME's cover story, a lengthy excerpt from Chinese Author Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, is a memoir of a very different kind. History will record not that the author shaped large events but that she simply survived to write a gripping personal account of her imprisonment between 1966 and 1973, during China's Cultural Revolution. Cheng, now 72, whose only crime was being born into a wealthy, land-owning Chinese family, was thrown into solitary confinement and ordered by Red Guards to confess to made-up crimes. She refused. Her captors finally released her in the mistaken belief that she was dying of cancer.

Executive Editor Ron Kriss directed this week's project with assistance from China-born Reporter-Researcher Oscar Chiang. Kriss served in South Korea while in the Army during the mid-1950s and later reported on China, then off limits to U.S. journalists, for United Press International from Tokyo. "I read Cheng's manuscript, and it knocked me out," says Kriss. "It is a powerful testament, akin to Arthur Koestler's tale of life under Soviet Communism, Darkness at Noon. It's an account of a brave woman's stubborn resistance to an overwhelmingly powerful regime." Kriss, who visited China last autumn, has watched with apprehension the government's recent attacks on intellectuals, students and those considered "bourgeois liberals." "Many of those responsible for the abuses of the Cultural Revolution 21 years ago are still in positions of power and authority," says Kriss. "I'm concerned that the pendulum may be swinging back to the bad old days."

Senior Writer Otto Friedrich pared the 544-page book down to 14,000 words for the excerpt. He met Cheng, who lives in Washington, for the first time this past March. "Her refusal to confess is absolutely extraordinary," says Friedrich. "As I spoke to her over lunch that day, I thought to myself, 'Would I have signed? Would I have given in, to spare myself the pain?' I looked across the table and knew that she had not."