Isabel Crook just couldn’t keep away from the unfolding story of China

Isabel Crook, who led one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century working tirelessly to improve the lives of China’s rural poor, has died aged 107.

Professor and anthropologist Isabel Crook, who has died aged 107. Picture: Supplied

China is a sullen one-party state and has been for 75 years. It has little regard for outsiders, unless it believes it has shared interests it might manipulate to its advantage.

The excitable Global Times newspaper sums up the swagger that passes for journalism in Beijing where it is published by the People’s Daily, part of the central committee of the Communist Party. The Global Times doesn’t like Australians. A couple of years ago, when Peter Dutton dared raise the issue of China’s cyber attacks on us, it responded that “Australia is always there, making trouble. It is a bit like chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes. Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off.”

The Global Times doesn’t like Canadians either and attacks them: “Canada’s anti-Chinese sentiments have reached a critical point … Blindly opposing China due to domestic political factors and ideological biases will only move Canada further away from its national interests.”

That was a few weeks ago. But in the Global Times this week was a generous story on the passing of Canadian Isabel Crook, who led one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century working tirelessly to improve the lives of China’s rural poor and to document their struggle for land reform.

The newspaper reported that Isabel had “shown great concern to China’s rural development and dedicated herself to English teaching … She died peacefully with her faith for the international communist cause, and the love for the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people.”

Isabel Crook (1915-2023), professor and anthropologist. Picture: Supplied

That’s not the whole story. The communists also locked her and her husband up for years as they fell victims to the turbulent fluctuations of the politics in the 1960s.

Isabel’s parents moved to China from Vancouver as missionaries towards the end of the Qing dynasty, China’s final imperial flourish that ended in chaos in 1912. They moved to Sichuan, where her father learnt the language and taught at a university and where their daughter was born. She grew up in Chengdu with some of China’s poorest people, returning to Canada to finish her school years and complete university where she studied anthropology, immediately returning to Sichuan, where she studied the Yi, a mountain people with links to Myanmar who operated a harsh male-dominated class system based on owning slaves.

In 1940, Isabel met an English Stalinist, David Crook. He’d fought in the Spanish Civil War and moved to China inspired by its communists, then still a coalescing guerrilla army. They married in London two years later and saw out the war, with Isabel joining the local communist party.

They returned to China, planning to stay perhaps two years, as David hoped to be a correspondent for London’s newspapers and Isabel wanted to study and record the land reforms transforming the country. The both worked on her book and stayed the rest of their lives.

Canadian Isabel Crook worked tirelessly to improve the lives of China’s rural poor and to document their struggle for land reform. Picture: Supplied

Moving to the village of Ten Mile Inn in Hebei province they lived frugally, eating with the locals, who took to the odd, tall couple who appeared to write down everything anyone said.

The Crooks thought communism good for the country and hoped it would raise living standards of the peasants in an equitable way, and perhaps that was the plan. Landless and illiterate villagers even took part in voting for the local leaders placing different coloured beans in jars. The Crooks celebrated the eviction of Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang, and Mao’s victory.

They were invited to stay to establish what would become the Beijing Foreign Studies University. They were paid in millet.

By 1966 Mao’s Cultural Revolution erupted and the fanatical student Red Guards he fostered were massacring “enemies” – even eating them. Perhaps millions died. The following year, accused of spying, David Crook was sent to Qincheng Prison and kept until 1973. He was interrogated regularly and even kept in solitary confinement. For three of those years Isabel was held at the university. They later described their captors in kind terms and Isabel said it was another exciting chapter of her eventful life.

The scales fell from their eyes on the night of June 3-4, 1989 when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square with soldiers firing live rounds. Thousands may have been crushed and killed.

The Crooks had been taking the student protesters bottles of water and sheets. They were revolted by the violence, but “we belonged, that’s why we stayed”.

David died in 2000. In 2019 President Xi Jinping presented Isabel with the Chinese Friendship Medal.

OBITUARY

Isabel Crook

Anthropologist

Born Chengdu, China, December 15, 1915; died Beijing, August 20, aged 107.