Jonathan Mirsky’s complex relationship with China was a defining facet of his life. A professor of Chinese language and history at Dartmouth College, he described himself as a “Mao fan” on his first visit to China in 1972. The group with which he was travelling were representatives of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, dedicated to ending the Vietnam War.
The time of his visit saw China undergoing its Cultural Revolution under the auspices of Mao Zedong, but the scale of its upheaval was little known outside the country. Indeed, after arriving at Guangdong in southern China, the group were taken to meet “a typical Chinese working family” who seemed quite prosperous and lived in an attractive home. Mirsky was duly impressed but the following morning, during a local stroll, he bumped into the father of the family who explained to Mirsky, who was fluent in Mandarin, that the “home” he and the group had visited was a show apartment for foreign visitors. He took Mirsky to his real home, a shabby apartment, and explained, too, that the crime situation, which the visitors had been told was “non-existent”, was, in fact, quite severe.
Mirsky, who has died aged 88, recounted how stunned he had been, in a book published in 2012 which recorded the reflections of scholars, diplomats and journalists on their first trip to China. From being a Mao fan, he turned into a disillusioned sceptic, suspicious of every venue and briefing and every account of how things should be understood. His scepticism was later reflected in the perspective of left-wing American intellectuals regarding Communist China. This scepticism remained with him after he left the academic world to become a journalist, and he was critical of western leaders for downplaying China’s violation of human rights for the sake of trade.
Born in Manhattan, the son of Alfred Mirsky, a pioneer in molecular biology, and Reba Paeff, a children’s author and harpsichord player, he was educated at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City and went on to Columbia University where he gained a BA in history. He spent a year at King’s College, Cambridge in 1954 and met an American woman, a former missionary in China, who persuaded him to study Mandarin. He spent three years studying the language in the US before going to Taiwan with his first wife Betsy, also a student of Mandarin. There they ran a language school for four years. Back in the US he was awarded a PhD in Chinese History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966.
He and Betsy divorced in 1963 and he later married Rhona Pearson, a British micro-biologist, with whom he moved in 1966 to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he became co-director of the East Asia Language and Area Studies Centre. He was, however, refused tenure, quite possibly because he had been an active protester against the Vietnam War, and in 1975 he and Rhona moved to London, where he became the China correspondent of the Observer, based in London but travelling frequently to China. The first of his six visits to Tibet for the paper intensified his critical views of the communist regime. What he also discovered to his distaste was not just communism but the racist imperialism shown by the Han Chinese to ethnic minorities.
He later visited the Dalai Lama in exile in north India. They became close friends and shared the same sense of humour. Mirsky cherished a long message he received from his friend a few weeks before his death.
He was at Tiananmen Square in the early morning of 9 June 1989 when the peaceful protesters were attacked by the People’s Liberation Army. At about 3am, when he was about to leave to file his report, he was approached by a group of armed police who, on discovering he was a journalist, beat him savagely, causing a fracture in his left arm and the loss of many teeth. For his coverage of the Tiananmen uprising in the Observer he won the 1989 International Reporter of the Year title in the International Press Awards.
During a later trip to China in 1991 the foreign ministry asked him to leave the country and told him he would never receive a visa again. He moved to Hong Kong in 1993 and became the East Asia correspondent of The Times. However, he resigned in 1998 because he disagreed with the more favourable approach to China taken by the proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Back in London, he wrote many reviews, mainly for the New York Review of Books, much admired by scholars of China for their erudition, colourfulness and acute observation.
On the social side, Mirsky enjoyed lunch with friends at Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly, and often told jokes, usually a Jewish one and an “off-colour” one. A close friend, Michael Yahuda, a former professor at the LSE, described him as a master of anecdotes.
Mirsky and Rhona divorced in 1986. In Hong Kong, ten years later, he married Deborah Glass, an Australian specialising in financial regulation. She became deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission when they moved to London. They separated in 2014 and Deborah returned to Australia. Jonathan Mirsky is survived by his sister Reba.
Jonathan Mirsky: born 14 November 1932. Died 5 September 2021.
