Isabel Crook has spent decades in China closely observing major events. As one of the oldest and longest living foreigners in China this Canadian in China has a very impressive view on the country’s history.

The 101-year-old Chinese-born Isabel Crook is among the country’s early foreign educators.

In her long years here, first as a child of a Canadian missionary family in Southwest China’s Sichuan province, and then as a teacher, Crook has witnessed many events: the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), the civil war, the founding of New China, the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) and China’s reforms since the ’70s.

“I am glad that I kept the records (of major events),” Crook says, while taking a stroll in a park near her apartment in the compound of Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she once taught.

She started anthropological research in Sichuan in 1939 after receiving her university degrees in Canada. As part of a social survey in a village there, she got to know many local people.

Crook and her Chinese research partner attended celebrations and studied community behavior in teahouses.

“The result … was a human factor, which you can miss out if you just do mechanical investigations,” she says.

After her retirement as an English teacher, Crook wrote the book Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform and Resistance in Rural Wartime China. She now wants to publish a Chinese version of the book for which the translation is ongoing.

In the early 1940s, Crook became interested in communism after meeting her late husband, David Crook, who was an active communist.

“He had just come back from fighting in Spain to support the Spanish republic. He had also done some interesting things in China. That made a big impression on me,” says Isabel Crook.

They married in London in 1942. Inspired by US journalist Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, the couple returned to China a few years later to write a book about life in Communist-controlled areas. Parts of China back then were ruled by the Kuomintang and local warlords.

During their stay in North China’s Hebei province, the couple learned about land reforms being carried out by the farmers and decided to write about them. Among the books they co-authored are Ten Mile Inn: Revolution in a Chinese Village (1959) and Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village (1979).

They were among few foreign scholars allowed to conduct grassroots research on the mainland between the 1950s and the 1970s. Their books became important sources for the outside world to learn about China at the time.

Ahead of New China’s founding in 1949, Isabel Crook and her husband were approached by officials of the Communist Party of China and asked if they could stay and teach English as the country was in desperate need of English speakers who could help build foreign relations.

“We were quite thrilled that we could do something significant to support the Chinese revolution,” recalls Crook.

She and her husband taught English at Beijing Foreign Studies University until they retired in the 1980s.

Their early students, who became the first generation of foreign-language speakers in modern China, either served in the foreign services or in organizations that had relations with foreign countries. Many of them became English teachers as well.

Excited to join the ranks rather than being observers, Isabel Crook and her husband also actively participated in mass movements like planting trees in suburban Beijing in the 1950s. The teachers and students stayed for several weeks in the homes of villagers outside the city and sang together during breaks.

“The important thing is you learn from both successes and failures. That’s what the Communists were doing. They were not afraid of mistakes,” she says of the mass movements initiated by the Party.

Over the years, Isabel Crook has made speeches before and written letters to top Chinese leaders on such issues as rural education and development.

Some of her letters along with his replies were included in a book published by Wen Jiabao after his term as premier was over in 2013.

After her retirement, she revisited the villages where she did her research.

She is glad that many people still recognize her and that some have even visited her in Beijing.

She is impressed by the vast improvements in rural China, especially the enhanced standard of living and the improving literacy rate.

Very few rural residents were literate before the 1950s. Now it’s compulsory students finish junior middle school, and there are very few illiterate people among the younger generation.

Though urbanization has been a good thing, enough attention must also be paid to how to develop China’s countryside, she says.

“If you only concentrate on urbanization, you don’t have balanced development.”