ISABEL CROOK (1915-2023) was a pioneering anthropologist, committed communist and rare bridge between the West and China. She was renowned, with husband David, for the study Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village, an invaluable record of the Communist Party of China’s mass line in action.

Isabel spent most of her life in China and was to witness its remarkable transformation from a war-torn land of beggars, bandits and people in rags under a corrupt Kuomintang (KMT) government to a country set on a path to prosperity, overcoming the problems of poverty, unemployment and instability, under communist leadership.

During the Cultural Revolution, she was kept in confinement by Red Guards for three years, receiving an apology from Zhou Enlai in 1973. In 1989, with David, she called on the government not to use force against the Tiananmen protesters. Isabel nevertheless was to remain optimistic about China’s future under CPC leadership.

The daughter of Canadian missionaries, Isabel first left China to study at the University of Toronto, returning after graduation in 1939. Taking a job with an “action research” project sponsored by the National Christian Council, Isabel spent a year in the small market town of Prosperity in Sichuan province, carrying out a survey of its 1,500 households, which overwhelmingly were in desperate poverty.

The project introduced Isabel to the progressive ideas of the rural reconstruction movement founded in 1926 by James Yen, whose work in mass literacy among the Chinese labourers in France during World War I received international acclaim.  

Yen’s ideas on solving China’s problems through rural revitalisation, starting from the education of the illiterate peasants, was to gain a strong following among China’s Christian community and the left wing of the nationalist KMT.

These reformers supported rural industrialisation based on small-scale co-operatives as better suited to Chinese conditions than the West’s large conglomerates, whose competition had driven the world into a devastating imperialist war.

These ideas on building from the grassroots, valuing co-operative enterprise and the role of the researcher-reformer, advising policy-making by actively taking part in social change, continued to inspire Isabel throughout her life and work. When she was introduced to the ideas of socialism and communism by David, who she met in 1940, it was no doubt the CPC’s mass-line approach, that was to chime especially with the reform ideals. And Marxism provided Isabel with the conceptual tools to make sense of the trials she saw China undergoing.

The pair spent the war years in London where Isabel joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Through the China Campaign Committee, they made contact with the CPC and in 1947 received an invitation to study land reform in one of the liberated areas. 

David and Isabel were to spend eight months in the village of Ten Mile Inn, living in the local people’s houses. There they closely observed the work of a team sent to guide the implementation of the Agrarian Law.  

Through interviews with villagers, leaders and work team members, the Crooks were able to explore in detail how the CPC forged bonds with the ordinary farmers as it guided them through the transformation of the village economy, developing the villagers’ class consciousness and strengthening the village political leadership. The three groups learned together by doing, correcting errors in land reform to the right and to the left, while in a parallel process of criticism and self-criticism, local cadres were able to learn from their mistakes.

Another invitation from the CPC leadership to assist in foreign languages training saw David and Isabel stay on. Her career preparing students for the PRC’s diplomatic service at the premier Foreign Languages Institute (later the Foreign Studies University), while raising a family of three sons as well as taking part in a political study group with other foreign comrades in Beijing kept Isabel fully occupied.

Retirement in 1981 saw her return to her Prosperity township research materials producing an extensive three-volume record of life in China under the KMT. Then in 2013, Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform and Resistance in Wartime China, a work co-authored with historian, Chris Gilmartin, was finally published — Isabel was 98. 

The book pins down the weakness in the rural reform project in its failure to “identify the power structures and vested interests that were hostile to the reform agenda and a corresponding failure to identify or develop allies to meet the challenge of a complex rural environment.” 

This fundamental issue of a class-based method is a lesson for rural development projects anywhere, one which highlights the reasons behind the CPC’s success.
 
In later years, Isabel was also active in the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (ICCIC also known as Gong He). Founded in 1939 on the initiative of New Zealander Rewi Alley, ICCIC had rallied international support for rural industrial co-operatives supplying China’s resistance against Japan’s aggression. It was suspended in 1952 but revived in 1987, taking advantage of China’s “reform and opening up” to promote genuine co-operatives in the new upsurge in rural industrialisation.

Isabel was to be a strong advocate of the grassroots approach of the Gong He “work-together” spirit, emphasising voluntary owner-member control and democratic management. At meetings arranged for resident foreign experts with Premier Zhu Rongji and then-premier Wen Jiabao, Isabel took the opportunity to speak about ICCIC and to call for a co-operative law. 

ICCIC was not only the first Chinese NGO with foreign members on the executive board, but also broke new ground for NGOs when it decided in 1998 to sever links with the government and become independently funded.  With younger economists, academics and government researchers all involved, the organisation provided a space for research and lively debate on the cooperative economy, also playing a role in China’s opening up through exchanges with international cooperative organisations.

Isabel’s continued contact with former students working in the diplomatic service gave her privileged insights into the workings of the CPC and the government. But it was her deep empathy for Chinese rural folk that always came first. She was to write: “As an anthropologist I had studied the terrible situation in rural Sichuan and could understand why the communists with land reform and other policies enjoyed massive support.”

As Isabel saw it, instead of telling people what to do, bestowing “liberation” from above, the CPC’s success lay in mobilising them to brainstorm ideas and come out with the right idea, so they felt ownership of the results.

But also aware of CPC shortcomings, Isabel was never uncritical: she would weigh the pros and cons of policies against the complexities of China’s circumstances.  And it was no doubt her appreciation of the party’s capacity to learn from mistakes that kept her optimistic.

In 2019, Isabel became one of the 10 people to receive a special friendship medal created by Xi Jinping to honour the contribution of foreigners to China’s development and international ties. We too should honour her contribution as an exceptional guide and inspiration in a world in which people-to-people understanding between the West and China becomes ever more urgent.

The full version of the article was published on the Friends of Socialist China website (www.socialistchina.org).