CHINA:SIDNEY RITTENBERG was born into a well-heeled family in Charleston, South Carolina, but his destiny has become completely entwined with China and the revolutions that transformed the country throughout the last century and into the current era.
His career stretches from heady revolutionary days living in a cave with Mao Zedong and his communist guerrillas before the revolution, to nights playing cards with future premier Zhou Enlai, to his current role as consultant on China's economy whose opinions are sought by the likes of Microsoft chief Bill Gates.
Rittenberg ( 87) has always had the ear of the powerful, but this closeness has occasionally cost him dear - he spent 16 of his 35 years in China in prison after being jailed twice, once by Mao and once on Stalin's orders.
But China remains a country he loves like no other. While he has renounced international revolution to become a consultant, his relationship to capitalism is at best ambiguous, mirroring China's own at times awkward relationship with the free market and the meteoric changes that have gripped the country since the late 1970s.
He is avowedly optimistic about the prospects of the party embracing democratic reform from within, particularly since the emergence at last year's national party congress of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang as likely successors to President Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao.
"The emergence of this kind of leader is a very hopeful sign. They face enormous challenges and progress is definitely not going to be easy," he said, speaking at a meeting of the foreign correspondents' club in Beijing.
Rittenberg is an immensely charming man, and it is easy to see how the communist leadership was swayed by his lively, intelligent manner.
"So you can tell me why God invented whiskey - to stop the Irish taking over the world," he said on hearing my accent. This is a man who was a close confidant of those who did, in fact, plan to take over the world in socialist revolution, and succeeded in China in 1949.
Born in 1921, Rittenberg studied philosophy at the University of North Carolina, and became a union organiser at the Camel cigarette factory before joining the army, where he studied Chinese and Japanese.
He landed in Shanghai after the second World War and soon after marched for 45 days to the communist stronghold at Yanan, where he met Zhou and Mao.
He once wrote that Mao didn't really like him very much, even though the chairman grilled the young private for information about life in America.
Asked what he thinks of the current formulation of the Mao era, that the Great Helmsman was 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad, he refuses to abandon his old hero and believes power corrupted Mao. "During the first five years there were great social reforms - eight-hour days, getting rid of epidemics, jobs for intellectuals. Then from 1956 the whole process started going downhill."
A fervent ideologue during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, Rittenberg was jailed, wrongly, for nine years in 1968 as a US spy and tortured in prison. He tells of hearing the voice of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, leader of the Gang of Four and a former dancing partner of his, and rejoicing, because he knew he would soon be let out of prison. He has spoken often of how deeply his years in solitary confinement have marked him.
Rittenberg returned to the US in 1980 and has said that backing the Cultural Revolution was a mistake, but like many a revolutionary who served jail time, he remains loyal to the ideals he has held since he was a young man, even if he has joined the ranks of the capitalist running dogs himself.
His knowledge of the current situation in the Communist Party is not as intimate as it once was, but you can see why Michael Dell and Bill Gates have sought out his view on China's future - he has a deep understanding of the way the Communist Party works, earned during his years as a mid-level cadre, and an insight into the way the leadership thinks.
This appreciation is particularly valuable when he tells of meeting Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping.
"When I was an unknown 25-year-old American crossing the Yellow River into Yanan in 1946, his [ Xi Jinping's] father met me at the crossing and he took me around the half-wilderness of Shaanxi province. People knew who he was. He had his finger on the pulse of these people and they talked very freely in front of him."
Although Rittenberg has not met Xi Zhongxun's son, who ascended to the Politburo at last year's national party congress, he believes the younger Xi is cut from the same cloth, describing him as "open-minded, moderate and good listener. Business oriented."
He has been married to his second wife, Yulin, for 50 years and they have four children. The family was imprisoned in labour camps during his second period in prison during the Cultural Revolution.
Rittenberg regrets Steven Spielberg's decision to quit as special artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics. "Steven Spielberg is a man for whom I have a great deal of admiration. I believe he's wrong in his decision about the Olympics. Anything that encourages a boycott is unfortunate," said Rittenberg.
While exposing human rights abuses is important to help those in the government he sees as "big reformers", he believes this should be kept separate from the Olympics.
"These games do not belong to the Communist Party, they are in the heart of the Chinese people. Anything that is perceived as an attack will make ordinary Chinese angry and resentful," he said.
"If you have very clever and forceful leaders, together with pressure from below, and pressure from outside, though that is secondary, it's possible for this leopard to change its spots. Will it happen? All we can do is hope. I like to think that it will happen, because Chinese are extremely innovative people."
Not surprisingly for someone who has witnessed so much fundamental change in his time in China, the word "transformation" peppers his comments, and he believes the party is moving towards greater democracy, but at its own pace. "You see in the inner party documents that the first step in democratising China is to democratise the party. The issue is not about giving up power, It's about whether the character of the power can be transformed."