Isabel Crook, educator whose life in China spanned a century of change, 107

Isabel Crook, a China-born daughter of Canadian missionaries who became one of her adopted country’s most celebrated foreign residents, beloved as an educator, anthropologist, and articulate advocate for the communist state, died Sunday in Beijing. She was 107.

Her son Carl Crook said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pneumonia.

Ms. Crook was among the last of a generation of Westerners born to missionaries in China in the decades before the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the subsequent communist revolution.

As an anthropologist, Ms. Crook saw herself as an observer of social change; as a communist, she saw herself as an agent of it.

After returning to China from college in Toronto in 1939, she conducted field work among the impoverished, isolated villages of western Sichuan province, traveling through ravines and mountain passes by foot, mule-cart, and even zip line.

She met her future husband, David Crook, in China. A dedicated British communist, he had fought against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War while also working as a spy for the Soviet NKVD, a precursor to the KGB. When the fighting ended, the NKVD sent him to perform similar work in China.

After World War II began, the couple moved to Britain, where David joined the Royal Air Force. Isabel worked in a munitions factory and joined the Communist Party. They married in 1942.

The Crooks returned to China in 1947 to teach English in villages and towns controlled by the Chinese Communist Party during the country’s civil war. They were among the few Westerners to accompany the columns of communists during their victorious entry into Beijing in 1949, marking the founding of the new state.

The Crooks became true believers in Chinese communism. They were on the founding faculty of what became Beijing Foreign Studies University, where they helped train several generations of Chinese diplomats.

Isabel Joy Brown was born Dec. 15, 1915, in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Her parents, Homer and Muriel (Hockey) Brown, were Methodist missionaries from Canada who worked in the country’s schools and universities.

She graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in anthropology in 1939. While living in wartime Britain she pursued a doctorate in the same subject at the London School of Economics but did not complete it.

In addition to her son Carl, she is survived by sons Michael and Paul; her sister, Julia Baker; six grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. David Crook died in 2000 at 90.

In 2019, President Xi Jinping awarded Ms. Crook the Friendship Medal of China, the country’s highest honor available to a foreigner.