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Personal & confidential: Jonathan Mirsky

When China scholar and journalist Jonathan Mirsky died in 2021 at the age of 88, Britain’s Guardian posted Jonathan Steele’s excellent obituary with many links recounting his career, mostly in British journalism. I recalled him myself on Power Line with the thoughts below.

Jonathan taught Chinese and Chinese history at Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate. I got to know Jonathan (as we all called him) as the center of the antiwar movement on campus. He must have spoken at every one of the many antiwar events I attended between 1969 and 1973. In retrospect, I think he was wrong about the war, but he was a warm and knowledgeable teacher who was willing to engage anyone who sought him out.

At the time Jonathan was a fan of Mao’s China. After a comically failed effort to enter China in 1969, he finally made his way in for six weeks as part of a group of young China scholars in April 1972. He returned to campus with a number of authentic Mao jackets that he wore around town along with his corduroy trousers that fall. It was a fashion statement that advertised his reverent attitude to the Chinese authorities.

When Jonathan failed to receive tenure at Dartmouth he went to work as a journalist in London. He used his expertise to cover China as the Observer’s China specialist and as East Asia editor of the Times.

Covering China, he changed his mind about the virtues of the Communist regime. He became a formidably learned critic of the Chinese Communists’ atrocities and repression. In 1989 he was named International Reporter of the year, an award he won the hard way. He was badly beaten up in Tiananmen Square during the bloodbath that year.

He must have published as many as a hundred essays and reviews on China in the New York Review of Books alone. To get the flavor of these pieces, see his Standpoint essay “The long shadow of Tiananmen” (June 2009). Jonathan subsequently filed a report on the NYRB blog proudly proclaiming that he had been “Banned in China” (“friends and colleagues are telling me what an honor it is to have one’s writing banned in the People’s Republic”).

On Power Line I noted Jonathan’s essay on Liu Xiabo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, in the New York Times Book Review and proposed a fitting headline for it: “Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool.” In 2012 Jonathan had another excellent piece in the Times Book Review, this one on the Great Famine. Jonathan wrote:

In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-­opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”

Jonathan did not generally use his reviews as a forum for pronouncements on the subject of the books he reviewed. Rather, he was a close reader who sought to convey the substance of the books. It reflects the quality that made him a generous teacher. Gladly would he learn and gladly teach.

I learned of Jonathan’s death via email from the New York Review of Books at the time. In connection with his death NYRB posted Jonathan’s 1990 review/essay “Lost Horizons” in accessible form, although it has now been returned behind the NYRB paywall. Please note, however, that Jonathan’s ChinaFile page compiles many of his NYRB reviews and essays on China in accessible form.

We all know how much our political views are bound up with our sense of ourselves. Change doesn’t come easily. When such change happens to honorable men along the path of their adult lives, it gives their work a special power. This was certainly the case with Jonathan.

* * * * *

The Guardian obituary on Jonathan recalled that at Dartmouth “he became co-director of the East Asia Language and Area Studies Center. However, he was refused tenure, in part because of his anti-Vietnam protest activity[.]” After I posted my thoughts on Jonathan at the time of his death in 2021, they elicited this remembrance from one of his former students:

Like you, I’m a Dartmouth grad…class of 1970, so I started the fall of 1966. During freshman year, I got the idea I wanted to study Chinese. As a junior midshipman in the Naval ROTC unit, I was well aware of Mirsky’s views and activities, so it was with some foreboding that I called on him in his office in little old Bartlett Hall. He could not have been more welcoming and we hit it off.

I began studying Chinese in the fall of sophomore year and toward the end of the year worked with Jonathan to develop a proposed major for me in “Asian Studies.” This was a full helping of Chinese language but also a collection of history and government courses that gave me a good grounding beyond language. I had “lost” a year of Chinese already, so Jonathan encouraged me to apply to a summer program at Stanford, which crammed second-year Chinese into ten grueling weeks. The Navy thought it was a fine idea, so released me from that summer’s duty at sea. By junior year, I had taken all the established courses in history and so on, so Jonathan taught me one-on-one in his office every term through graduation, an intensive directed personal seminar in Chinese and other Asian history and politics. Of course, we developed a close working relationship.

As my years at Dartmouth went on, I decided that I would try to get into Naval Intelligence upon graduation and commissioning. I shared this intention with Jonathan, and he encouraged me. More than once when he and I were in discussion with another prof or student, Jonathan would jocularly tell him that despite our profound political differences, he was “training me for the CIA.” He joked about it, but he did seriously dedicate himself unstintingly to my education and career preparation. (I did in fact spend my entire career in intelligence, including three stints at CIA, so he knew what he was talking about.) Not once was he ever snide or nasty to me as leftists are so commonly nowadays. He was a thoroughly honorable man in my experience of him.

We corresponded in the years after Dartmouth and I was treated to his personal account of the events at Tiananmen Square. I thanked him for all his help in the acknowledgments in my first book, China as a Maritime Power (Westview, 1983). Through the years, he always addressed me by the Chinese surname he assigned me the first week of my first Chinese class: “Mu.” I wondered if he was ill or failing in the past few years. The last two or three letters I wrote to him went unanswered. So the news of his death was not a shock.

Scott, allow me to use this opportunity to tell you how much I enjoy Power Line. I read it avidly every day, and have done for years. I often send links to especially good articles to my friends and colleagues across the US and overseas.

As for me, I’m happily retired with two grown daughters (both adopted in China), living with my wife in Lexington, Virginia in the central Shenandoah Valley. Both Washington & Lee and VMI are in our small town, so I enjoy access to a good library. I publish occasionally in biblical studies, but also did a memoir of my intelligence career.

I wish you well, and please convey my best regards to the Power Line team.

Dave Muller

David G. Muller, Jr.
Dartmouth ’70
Commander, US Navy (ret.)

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