Jonathan Mirsky
Combative historian and passionate critic of China who fell out with Rupert Murdoch’s Times
JONATHAN MIRSKY, the writer on Chinese affairs, who has died aged 88, swapped admiration for the Communist government in China for such sustained criticism of its human rights record that Beijing banned him from entering the country – a move that prompted even greater efforts to expose its shortcomings.
For almost 40 years, Mirsky wrote with authority and passion about China’s human rights abuses in The Observer, The Times, and other outlets. His capacity for outrage gave his writing a power and impact denied to authors of a more dispassionate persuasion.
Mirsky was a historian of China. But nuance was not his métier, and this was both the strength and weakness of his reporting. He had an unerring eye for the harm China’s leaders perpetrated against their people, but a blind spot when it came to the vast improvements in living standards most Chinese experienced during the time he reported on the country.
He believed his task was to expose the lies at the heart of regime, its abominable treatment of critics – from Tibetans to the leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 – and what he regarded as the failure of politicians and businesses in the West to take China to task for its serial abuses of human rights.
Mirsky’s coverage of China was an antidote to the naivety, lack of knowledge and, often, greed that led many to accept China on the terms laid down by its leaders. But it also left him open to criticism that his approach was one-dimensional and that he was more polemicist than analyst.
In 1998 this landed him in hot water with The Times, which had taken him on as East Asia editor based in Hong Kong during the final years of British administration. Mirsky alleged that the paper’s editor, Peter Stothard, had refused to run many of the stories he had filed on the orders of Rupert Murdoch, then said to be eyeing lucrative business deals in the People’s Republic.
Stothard denied the claims, and sources in the paper complained that some of Mirsky’s copy was simply unusable. When Stothard refused to print unedited a letter from Mirsky responding to his denial, Mirsky resigned.
The furore was, naturally, covered extensively in The Daily Telegraph and other rival newspapers. Mirsky, as always, revelled in the publicity.
Jonathan Mirsky was born in New York on November 14 1932. His mother, Reba Paeff, was a children’s author while his father Alfred Mirsky was a distinguished molecular biochemist. Mirsky would claim that his father was a violent man, and that he owed his stutter to the beatings he received as a child.
After attending the city’s Ethical Culture Fieldston School he took a BA in History at Columbia and in 1954 spent a year at King’s College, Cambridge. He began studying Mandarin and went to Taiwan with his fellow student and first wife, Betsy. In 1966 he completed a PHD at the University of Pennsylvania in Tang history (618-907).
Mirsky was a critic of his country’s refusal to recognise the Communist government in power in Beijing, and in 1969, together with Quaker peace activists, he tried to enter China in a small sailing vessel but was turned away.
He succeeded in gaining entry in 1972, the year of President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing. He returned impressed by what he had seen and went to astonish some of the students at Dartmouth, where he was now teaching, by wearing the “Mao jackets” he had bought in China. But his opposition to the Vietnam War made it hard for him to get tenure at Dartmouth and he and his second wife, Rhona Pearson, a British neurobiologist, moved to London.
There, Mirsky secured a temporary post teaching Chinese history at Hatfield Polytechnic, where he made an impression by the academic demands he made of his students and his tendency to row in public with some of his fellow academics.
For, despite his warmth, Mirsky was a disputatious man who gave little quarter to those with whom he disagreed. Feuds could be as colourful as they were long lasting, though when he divulged their details to confidants, his accounts often strained credulity. At Hatfield he claimed that the head of history, a distinguished diplomatic historian with a very different personality and political viewpoint, had threatened him with violence to prevent him from taking over the department.
In the early 1980s Mirsky was taken on by The Observer as their China expert, based in London. Chairman Mao had died, and China was changing fast under Deng Xiaoping, the architect of economic reform and the opening up of the country.
In an Observer article published in October 1979 with the headline “Back to the land of little red lies”, Mirsky complained that he been lied to during his 1972 visit, and blamed himself for “wanting to be deceived”. It was a turning point in his attitude towards the country.
Mirsky tended to dominate most of the gatherings he attended and though, as a journalist, he struck up friendly relations with British officials and senior politicians in charge of Chinese matters, some of them found him to be rather too fond of his own voice. “I just advised the minister to listen when Mirsky interviewed him,” one diplomat said. “I told him that although it was an interview, Mirsky would do all the talking.”
Mirsky’s coverage of protests against Chinese rule in Tibet and the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 sealed his reputation as a critic of the regime. They also won him the British Press Awards title of International Reporter of the Year. He received a nasty beating at the hands of paramilitary police as soldiers moved in to clear the square of protesters on the night of June 4, and “dined out” on the experience for long thereafter.
Assigned to Hong Kong for The Times in 1993, by which time he had been banned from entering China, he made good friends with Governor Chris Patten, who shared his dislike of the regime across the border.
In 1997 he married, thirdly, Deborah Glass, an Australian-born financial regulator with whom he returned to London on his retirement.
During the next two decades Mirsky was a prolific writer of book reviews on China for The New York Review of Books, The Spectator and the Literary Review, among others.
A man of great warmth, usually good humour, and a gift for friendship, Mirsky could be great company, regaling his friends with jokes and anecdotes, though his tendency to exaggerate and to take things personally could be wearisome.
He numbered the Dalai Lama among his friends, earning him another black mark in Beijing. A letter from the Dalai Lama was said to have comforted him as he lay ill in bed shortly before he died.
Jonathan Mirsky and his third wife, Deborah, parted in 2014.
Jonathan Mirsky, born November 14 1932, died September 5 2021