Jonathan Mirsky chronicler and critic of China dies at 88

Ian Cumming Jonathan Mirsky, left, meets with the Dalai Lama in London in 2015.

Jonathan Mirsky first traveled to China in 1972 with a group of scholars who, like him, were sympathetic to the communist cause. The United States at the time was mired in the Vietnam War, which Dr. Mirsky ardently opposed. In his eyes, Maoism, the form of communism developed by Chinese leader Mao Zedong, held intrigue, if not allure.

He and his “fellow trippers,” Dr. Mirsky would later write in the British magazine the Spectator, were “bowled over by the assurances, banquets, smiles, friendly children, spotless factories, hospitals and cheerful peasants” â€" a grand deception, he would soon realize, designed to disguise the realities of life under communism. As one of the guides remarked to him years later, “We wanted to put a ring in your nose, and you helped us put it there.”

Trained as a historian, Dr. Mirsky, an American, set aside his study of the past to cover the momentous events of modern China as a journalist â€" emerging as a forceful critic of the Chinese government and its abuses. Chief among them was the 1989 massacre of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where Chinese police, recognizing Dr. Mirsky as a reporter, knocked out his teeth and broke his arm.

Dr. Mirsky covered Tiananmen Square for the London Observer, where he spent years as a correspondent, but he was perhaps best known to American readers for his frequent commentaries in the New York Review of Books. He died Sept. 5, age 88, at his home in London. His British death certificate provided no specific medical cause.

More than three decades after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, the exact number of fatalities is unknown, with some estimates in the hundreds and others in the thousands. But memories of the confrontation remain vividly clear in China and abroad, where the image of a lone protester standing off against a column of Chinese government tanks became an emblem of peaceful protest.

Dr. Mirsky witnessed the events from a marble bridge near a gate to the Forbidden City.

“As the silver streaks of bullets lighted the darkness, a student next to me said: ‘Don’t worry. The soldiers are using blanks.’ A few seconds later he slumped over, dead, with a wet red circle on his chest,” Dr. Mirsky wrote in an account published years later in the Observer.

“As I began to leave the square,” he went on, “I came to a knot of armed police whose trouser bottoms had been ignited by Molotov cocktails thrown by workers. When they saw me passing they shouted at me to stop. I said: ‘Don’t hit me. I’m a journalist.’ ”

One officer replied with a profanity.

“As they began beating me with their rubber truncheons, the officer shot fallen demonstrators,” Dr. Mirsky recounted. “My left arm was fractured, half-a-dozen teeth were knocked out and I thought I was finished. But a British journalist running out of the square swerved, took my arm, and led me away. I managed to dictate my story by phone.”

Despite his injuries, Dr. Mirsky returned to the square the next morning and watched soldiers fire on parents who had come to look for news, or the remains, of their sons and daughters who had participated in the protests. Doctors and nurses who had come to aid the wounded were shot down, too, Dr. Mirsky wrote in a reflection published in the New York Review of Books in 2014.

Dr. Mirsky was honored with a British Press Award for his coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, according to obituaries published in England.

“He had great courage,” Roger Garside, a China expert, former British diplomat and friend of Dr. Mirsky’s, said in an interview. “He had physical courage, moral and intellectual courage.”

Michael Powell

Times of London

Dr. Mirsky in 1993.

In his later writings, Dr. Mirsky denounced the actions of the Chinese government, including its repression of the people of Tibet, where Dr. Mirsky traveled several times. He befriended the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, who was said to have written to Dr. Mirsky shortly before Dr. Mirsky died.

“People felt he was very smart but that he had this sort of mind-set that was pretty unalterable,” Orville Schell, a journalist, author and China scholar, said in an interview, referring to Dr. Mirsky’s position on the communist government. “It turns out,” Schell added, “to be a not inaccurate assessment.”

Jonathan Mirsky was born in Manhattan on Nov. 14, 1932. His father was a biochemist, and his mother, a musician, wrote children’s books.

Dr. Mirsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York before enrolling at Columbia University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1954 and a master’s degree in 1957, both in history. He also studied at the University of Cambridge in England, where an encounter with a former missionary to China ignited his interest in the Mandarin language.

Dr. Mirsky studied Mandarin before traveling with his first wife, Elizabeth Latimore, to Taiwan. (They later divorced.) He returned to the United States and received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, specializing in the history of the Tang dynasty.

While teaching at Dartmouth College, Dr. Mirsky was arrested at least once for his participation in protests against the Vietnam War. He and his second wife, Rhona Pearson, a British neurobiologist, eventually moved to England, where Dr. Mirsky began his career in journalism. (They also divorced.)

Dr. Mirsky was forced to leave China in 1991 but continued covering the region from Hong Kong as East Asia editor of the Times of London. He resigned that position in the late 1990s, alleging that the newspaper softened its coverage of China in deference to the business interests of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. The editor at the time, Peter Stothard, strenuously disputed Dr. Mirsky’s interpretation.

In 1997, Dr. Mirsky married Deborah Glass, from whom he later separated. Other survivors include a sister.

Until nearly the end of his life, Dr. Mirsky continued to bedevil the Chinese authorities. As recently as 2011, he wrote in the New York Review of Books, censors tore a four-page article with his byline from 731 copies of Newsweek magazine on sale in China.

“I am reminded of the old street sweeper in 1990 at a corner in Beijing,” he wrote in 2014. “She was shoveling donkey dung into a pail. I asked her if she thought things had changed for the better. She replied, ‘This city is like donkey dung. Clean and smooth on the outside, but inside it’s still [dung].’ ”

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