The pioneering anthropologist Isabel Crook, who has died aged 107, was the last survivor of that generation of sympathetic westerners who joined Mao Zedong’s rural revolution and stayed on after 1949 to build a “new China” – with mixed fortunes.
During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) her husband David Crook was accused of spying and imprisoned for five years, while Isabel was locked up for three years on their college campus. The couple retained their belief in the post-Mao leadership of the Communist party until, horrified by the Beijing massacre in Tiananmen square (1989), they spoke out against it.
Yet the buffeting of Chinese politics under Mao and after that dominated their lives and those of many others who “stayed” should not obscure Isabel’s remarkable career from an early age pursuing anthropological fieldwork in remote and difficult areas of China.
Isabel’s parents, Muriel (nee Hockey) and Homer Brown, were Methodist missionaries who left Canada separately and met at the West China Mission in Chengdu, marrying in 1915. Both were active in promoting public education, and Muriel opened schools for deaf Chinese children. Homer learned Chinese quickly and in time became dean of education at the West China Union University in Chengdu, where Isabel, and her sisters Muriel and Julia, were born and went to the Canadian School.
In 1939, after graduating from Victoria College, University of Toronto, Isabel set off with a Chinese colleague to study the villages of the Yi minority people (known as Lolos then), a slave-based society who believed in shamans, in West Sichuan. They crossed a river “on rafts that sank ankle-deep beneath the surface … the current was so strong that we were carried miles downstream.”
It was opium country and, as in other areas where she would work, there were “bandits”. But, Isabel would observe, they were really robbers, not bandits: “They were poor farmers in the off-season … they had to go up in the hills and come down and do their banditry.”
The following year, Isabel was recruited to join a rural reconstruction project sponsored by the Chinese National Christian Council in a desperately poor rural area not far from the wartime capital of Chongqing. Her assignment was to conduct a major survey of the communities’ 1,500 families. “We set out on our household visits with stout sticks to beat off the ubiquitous dogs,” she would recall, but when the villagers saw they were unthreatening young women and not oppressive government agents, the dogs were called off.
Isabel intended to publish her work as Prosperity Village – it was even listed for a while by Routledge and Kegan Paul – but marriage, the revolution, and Mao intervened. The thousands of pages of field data remained in the desk until the 1990s when she returned to the area for more research which finally led to the publication of Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform and Resistance in Wartime China, with Christina K Gilmartin and Xiji Yu, in 2013.
When Isabel met David in 1941, he had been a committed member of the British Communist party for several years and a volunteer in Spain. Much later he would regret his role as a Soviet agent there spying on anti-Stalinists in Barcelona. He had been transferred by his handlers to Shanghai, but was obscurely dropped by them and made for Chongqing.
The couple agreed to get married in Britain and returned separately by dangerous routes. Isabel swiftly joined the Communist party and found herself standing outside Euston station and selling the Daily Worker. She soon enrolled for a PhD at the London School of Economics: her thesis was based on the Prosperity material. After the second world war, they returned to China, planning to stay for a year and a half. Instead they would remain in China till the end of their lives.
They headed for the communist “liberated areas” as the civil war with Chiang Kai-shek began to turn in Mao’s favour. David planned to write for British newspapers, hoping to emulate the US journalist Edgar Snow (who had interviewed Mao before the war). Isabel proposed to strengthen her thesis by studying another rural township with a different economic base.
It would be an exercise in applied anthropology, with research that could contribute to new development policy. Arriving in the chosen village by mule cart, they slept in peasant homes, lived on millet and sweet potatoes, and listened to “the musical chant of the doughnut pedlars”, while they got to grips with communist policy that would transform rural society.
This time it was Isabel’s plan that prevailed: David never became a journalist while her research, with which he helped, led to their classic account of one of the first land reforms in China (Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn, 1959).
When the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing in 1949, the Crooks watched the genuine enthusiasm, after years of Nationalist party misrule, with which it was greeted. “It is the most joyful [moment]”, Isabel recalled, “I think I’ve ever watched.”
Still planning to return to Britain, they were invited to stay and set up a foreign languages school to train new diplomats. In time this would become the Beijing Foreign Studies University, where they lived and worked over some four decades.
In 1959-60 Isabel and David returned to Ten Mile Village, now part of one of the new communes set up in the Great Leap Forward. They had no visible qualms about Mao’s attempt to speed up socialism by relying on mass enthusiasm, and they rejected “the doubts of some friends and the fears and obstructions of enemies”.
Yet, perhaps aware that there were serious problems elsewhere if not in this commune, they said that their study would be “strictly limited as to time and place”. The resulting book (The First Years of Yangyi Commune) was published in 1966 as Mao’s next wilful experiment began with the Cultural Revolution: it is a less satisfying account of rural reform and political struggle than was its predecessor Ten Mile Inn.
After release in 1973 from prison and confinement, the Crooks were vindicated, along with other foreign residents who had suffered, at a reception by then Premier Zhou Enlai, who sought to moderate the extremes of the Cultural Revolution. When Zhou died in January 1976, Isabel cycled through the snow to wait in the dark for his funeral cortege to pass – in vain because the ultra-left leadership (the Gang of Four led by Madame Mao) prevented any display of mourning.
The political climate improved after Mao’s death and the downfall of the Gang, but in 1989 the death of another popular leader, the former party secretary Hu Yaobang, would spark a new mass movement to challenge the authorities.
In May Isabel and David visited the student hunger-strikers in Tiananmen Square with bottled water and plastic sheets, and wrote to the official People’s Daily saying they “fervently hope[d] that no attempt will be made by China’s leaders to settle the present crisis by force”. Instead the Square became, as David would describe it, the Place of Massacre.
Appalled by the slaughter and by the official lies, the couple might have left China for ever – but they remained. They had stayed first in 1949, Isabel said, because they were participants “in a revolutionary movement embracing a whole people”, and their lives were inseparable from China whatever happened. Now, in retirement, they were given the status of advisers.
In 2019 Isabel was presented in person by President Xi Jinping with the Chinese Friendship medal, described as “the top honour for foreigners”. “I’m glad I did what I did”, Isabel told her son Michael in a film for Chinese television. She had spent 90 years of her life in China. “We belonged, and this is why we stayed.”
David died in 2000; Isabel is survived by their three sons, Carl, Michael and Paul, six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, and her sister, Julia.
• Isabel Crook, anthropologist, born 15 December 1915; died 20 August 2023
