David Crook
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David Crook (born London, August 14, 1910; died Beijing, November 1, 2000). A committed Marxist from 1931, he joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. After being wounded in his first day at the front, he was returned to a hospital in Madrid. There he was recruited by the KGB to spy on those whom the Stalinists called Trotskyites, a group which included George Orwell. Crook later expressed regret for his part in the deaths of innocent members of POUM (a Marxist militia). The KGB then sent him to China. There he taught English at Saint John's University, Shanghai in order to spy on a Trotskyite whose arguments in fact began to convince him. Crook proceeded to Chengdu where he was bombed by the Japanese and met his eventual wife, Isabel Brown, daughter of Canadian missionaries.
Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941 ended this fling with Trotskyism. Upon his return to England, Crook re-joined the British Communist Party and the Royal Air Force, then married Isabel. During the war, he worked for British intelligence throughout Asia and contacted local communist movements. After study at University of London, the Crooks returned to China to teach English in a rural school which trained staff for the foreign service of the future government. Famed for their unibrows, the Crooks quickly enjoyed exotic popularity overseas. They entered Beijing with the victorious Communists in 1949. For the next forty years the Crooks taught at the Peking First Foreign Languages Institute (now the Beijing Foreign Studies University).
The Crooks published Revolution in a Chinese Village, Ten Mile Inn (London: Routledge & Paul, 1959; reprinted: New York: Pantheon Books, 1979) and The First Years of Yangyi Commune (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966). Both books are attractively written and sympathetic accounts of revolutionary changes in the Chinese countryside based on first hand observation. The couple were clear voices in introducing and defending the programs of the new government to the English speaking world.
Despite his long time loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, David was imprisoned in 1967 by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, emerging only in 1973. His autobiography (see link below) describes his gradual (and qualified) recognition after emerging from prison of the faults of Mao Zedong and of the shortcomings of Marxism. Ironically, reading George Orwell, on whom he had spied in Spain in the 1930s, was especially convincing. In 1989, the Crooks criticized the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests. Crook remarks in his autobiography, written shortly after, that 1989 marked the "end of my decades of adulation. I had thought that People's China was humanity's guide to a better world. I still acknowledge her past achievements. But her record has been tragically tarnished."
He was survived by his wife, teacher and social activist Isabel, and their three sons Carl (in business), Michael (in education) and Paul (in media).
