Nien Cheng was the author of a single book, Life and Death in Shanghai, an autobiographical account of her sufferings during China’s Cultural Revolution. Published in 1986 after her emigration to the US, the book became a bestseller, earning her fame as one of the most articulate chroniclers of the cruelties of Chinese communism.

She was born Yao Nien-Yuan into a wealthy family in Beijing. She studied initially at Yenching University in the capital, but in 1935 her father, a naval vice-minister and Anglophile, sent her to Britain to continue her education at the London School of Economics. Her tutor’s difficulties in pronouncing her name led her to shorten it simply to Nien. While in London she met another Chinese student, Cheng Kang-Chi. She was to marry him in 1939, thus acquiring the name Nien Cheng, and would also adopt his Christian religion.

On returning to China in 1940, Nien’s husband, a staunch nationalist, joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Kuomintang’s provisional capital at Chongqing. He was soon posted with his wife to Australia, where he was charged with establishing an embassy. In 1948 he was recalled to China to work for the ministry in Shanghai. Only a year later, Chiang Kai-Shek’s defeated Kuomintang left the mainland for Taiwan. The Chengs, however, chose to remain in China. Cheng Kang-Chi served for a year as foreign affairs adviser to the mayor of Shanghai before becoming general manager for Shell, the sole multinational oil company that continued to operate in China after the communist victory. After her husband’s death from cancer in 1957, Nien Cheng herself was employed by the company as a special adviser to his British successors.

In 1966 Shell withdrew from China as Chairman Mao initiated his Cultural Revolution. Nien, who continued to live in relative prosperity with her only daughter, Meiping, and three servants, was an inevitable target. On July 3, a group of students in the uniform of the Red Guards vandalised her house and destroyed many of her possessions. The following month she was arrested and accused of spying for the British.

There followed six and a half years of imprisonment in the No 1 Detention House in Shanghai, where Nien was kept in solitary confinement. Her book was to recount in detail the sufferings of these years. Refusing to confess to crimes of which she was innocent, she endured beatings, handcuffing and lengthy interrogations, which in turn broke her health. In this dire situation, she displayed an extraordinary resourcefulness, keeping her mind active by doing mental arithmetic and by reciting Chinese poetry and passages from the Bible under her breath. She even studied Mao’s

Little Red Book, quoting its dictums back at her captors in support of her own defiance.

In March 1973 she was told that she would be released. Initially, to the astonishment of her captors, she refused to go, stating that she would stay in prison until she had been declared officially innocent. Eventually, she was compelled to leave the detention house, only to learn that her beloved daughter had died in 1967. At first, she was told that the death had been a suicide, but she later learnt that Meiping had been killed by the Red Guards after refusing to incriminate her mother.

For a few years after her release, Nien lived in poverty in Shanghai. Her health slowly improved, and after Mao’s death in 1976 she was gradually rehabilitated, receiving an official apology in 1978 and being allowed to access her previously frozen bank accounts. At last, in 1980, she obtained permission to leave China. She went to the US, but refused to apply for political asylum, saying that it would be an admission of helplessness. This refusal meant that she could not settle in the US, so she went instead to the Canadian capital of Ottawa, where she lived for three years. In 1983, having finally obtained permission to live in the US, she took up residence in Washington DC.

By then, encouraged by her friend Peggy Durdin, she was at work on her memoirs, written in English. She strove to produce “a faithful account of my experiences . . . recorded in chronological order, just as they occurred”. Her account was remarkable both for its lucidity and for its refusal simply to condemn her oppressors: rather, she sought to understand their behaviour, and to forgive them. On publication in 1986, the book won critical acclaim and wide popularity, spending months on The New York Times bestseller list. It earned her an invitation to a banquet the following year at the White House, where she was seated beside President Reagan. In 1988 she took American citizenship.

After the book’s publication Nien lectured widely, initially to student audiences, about her ordeals. But as China embraced capitalism, she found herself in demand addressing corporate audiences eager for advice on how to do business with the Chinese. These lectures took her to Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. She also served on a US government commission, sponsored by Joseph Biden, then a senator, and charged with establishing a radio programme that would broadcast pro-democracy sentiments to China. But she took greatest pride in having established a scholarship fund in memory of her daughter at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.

Her friends and visitors were unfailingly impressed by her independence, vitality and serenity. After her death, the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “She sometimes spoke of the necessity of having ‘a task’ in life. She had hers and did not fail at it: defying her captors, bearing witness, and then living the unbearable with a dignity that seemed touched with grace.”

She leaves no survivors.

Nien Cheng, dissident and author, was born on January 28, 1915. She died on November 2, 2009, aged 94