6/9/2023 0 Comments Cheng nienBut he was to die, of cancer, in 1957, while serving as a general manager for Shell, one of the few foreign companies that maintained a presence in Mao's China.Īfter his death, Nien took up the position of political adviser to Shell and lived with their daughter, Meiping, a successful actor, in a large house in Shanghai, with antique furniture, servants and a good standard of living. The foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 meant that Kang-chi's political affiliations were potentially a problem. A supporter of the Nationalists, on the couple's return to wartorn China in the 1940s he joined the ministry of foreign affairs, and they lived in Australia briefly, setting up an embassy there. She was born Yao Nien Yuan into a rich landowning family in Beijing and was studying at the London School of Economics in 1935 when she met her future husband, Kang-chi Cheng. Life and Death in Shanghai (1987) is a memoir of huge sorrow and triumph by Nien Cheng, who has died aged 94 it could be read as symbolic of the story of modern China itself. Several years before Jung Chang's Wild Swans (1991) proved a sensation in the west, the work of another Chinese woman who suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution's years of turbulence had become the first bestseller in English about this period.
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