David Crook and his wife Isabel  in Wu'an County, Hebei Province, in 1947 (COURTESY OF CHINA TODAY)

Appropriately, the memorial meeting for David Crook, writer, educator and old and devoted friend of China and her people, began with the singing of the Internationale, as he himself had willed.

For David, who died on November 1, 2000 at the age of 90, had lived most of his life, and most of the previous century, as a convinced Communist and internationalist. Born of middle-class British-Jewish parents in 1910, he began his political life in the 1930s when studying at Columbia University in the United States. The U.S., which in the previous decade had appeared as a model of burgeoning prosperity - "two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage" - had suddenly plunged into the deep and prolonged global depression of the capitalist system. Multitudes of unemployed went hungry. Colleges became hubs of social protest. David, who had joined the U.S. Communist Youth League, went with fellow-students to help coal miners on strike against low pay and maltreatment in Harlan County, Kentucky - but they were forcibly blocked from doing so.

After returning to England, he joined the British Communist Party. In 1936 he volunteered for the International Brigade fighting for the Spanish Republic against the armed revolt of fascist General Franco backed by the military intervention of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

While in Spain, David read Edgar Snow's book, Red Star Over China. Spain and China were then close in spirit, co-pioneers in armed resistance to fascism. David's lifelong interest in China was sparked, and he himself took a teaching job in Chengdu, in China's western province of Sichuan, and there met his Canadian future wife Isabel Brown, born in the country and close to its people.

In 1939, when World War II broke out in Europe, David joined the British air force, serving in India and Southeast Asia till the war's end in 1945.

Afterwards, he was briefly in New York again, working with Edgar Snow and others in support of the Industrial Cooperative (Gung Ho) movement in China.

In the meantime, Chiang Kaishek, with U.S. backing, was resuming civil war against the forces led by the Chinese Communists who had fought hardest and best against the Japanese invaders. From England, David and Isabel came once more to China - bound for the Liberated Areas with an introduction from the British Communist Party, intending to gather on-the-spot material about the Chinese revolution in the years since Snow's book. During their in-depth study of the land reform in one Chinese village, they were accepted as comrades in Party life and studies, including "the salutary practice of criticism and self-criticism," as Isabel recalled in her talk at the memorial meeting.

Originally, they had planned to go to England to write up their research. [Only in 1959 were their findings published in England as Revolution in a Chinese Village, followed in 1979, by updating sequel, titled Ten Mile Inn (the translated place name)]. Instead, at the request of the Chinese Communist Party's Foreign Affairs Committee, they began the career in education that would last the rest of their active lives - in a school to equip future diplomats of the coming new China with the English language. Over the decades, scores of their students would become ambassadors and other senior officials representing China abroad.

Isabel Crook, speaking for the family, told of the years of research and teaching in the Liberated Area. She stressed how much she and David appreciated being included there in Party life, in particular its practice of criticism and self-criticism, and of why she decided to stay in China on two occasions, when about to leave.

The first was in 1948, when, having completed their rural research in the Liberated Areas. they were preparing to return to England. But they were asked, on behalf of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, to remain and teach.

The second time was in 1959-60, when China's relations with the Soviet Union and between the world's Communist Parties became strained, David had been offered and was prepared to accept, a good position at Leeds University. But soon, Isabel said, Khruschev abruptly recalled thousands of Soviet experts working in China. If David too left then, he would be seen as taking the Soviet side against the Chinese. So he told the school's Party Secretary that he and Isabel might delay their departure. The response was "Stay." And, said Isabel, "We stayed - to this very day."

In the storms of the "Cultural Revolution" (1966-1976), David, like so many others, was unjustly imprisoned - for five year. But, Isabel said, he never blamed China. All in all, "David's life - and that of our entire family - has been immeasurable enriched by our participation in China's great but tortuous revolution."

Speaking for the University, Senior Professor Mei Ruyi, once a student of David's, then a lifelong friend, told of David's deep feeling for the Chinese people, and his having won the respect and love of his students. In the hard yeas of the early '60s, David had cut his own salary in half.

Prof. Mei also recounted how, after David's release from wrongful imprisonment, Premier Zhou Enlai "declared his rehabilitation in the Great Hall of the People and made a public apology." Back to teaching, David collaborated on a new Chinese-English dictionary. At age 67, he composed and gave a very well received course on world history. In repeated speaking tours in America, Europe and Oceania, and in numerous articles published abroad, he brought knowledge of China's achievements in socialist construction to the world. In later years, appointed adviser to the University, he made many useful suggestions. Among foreigners in Beijing, he organized study groups to help them understand the new China. As a final contribution, he left his body to science. "A Communist fighter who served the people wholeheartedly," Prof. Mei summed up, "his dauntless and devoted spirit will forever inspire the teachers and students of the University."

From the grassroots, a young man from the village site of the Crook's social study more than a half century ago, told of David's lasting concern for its people, and of how, in a recent water shortage there, he had persuaded the county authorities to have a deep well drilled there to solve the problem.

From the government, vice-premier Li Lanqing wrote appreciatively, "Comrade Crook, in his history of more than 50 years in China, devoted his energy to China's revolution and construction, contributing outstandingly to the training of talents for our diplomatic, foreign trade and educational fronts."

(China Today, NO. 2, 2001)