THE triumph of Mao Zedong’s Communist armies in 1949 sparked a rapid exodus from China of Western diplomats, businessmen, missionaries and other adventurers, ending a century of intense Western contact that had begun with the Opium War. Yet the new Communist regime, like its imperial predecessors, had its own coterie of foreign advisers. These were the “foreign friends” or “foreign experts” who, for political and/or personal reasons, chose to live in “ New China” and work full time for Mao’s revolutionary cause. Prominent among them was the journalist and author Israel Epstein.

Epstein was born in Poland, but spent all but a few years of his long life in China. He became a Chinese citizen in 1957 and a member of the Communist Party in 1964. For more than half a century, he took a leading role in presenting Communist China in the best possible light in Beijing’s English-language publications.

His reward was a life of relative material comfort — interrupted by a harsh spell of imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution — and enormous social prestige. Hu Jintao, leader of the Communist Party, called on him in April to celebrate his 90th birthday, praising Epstein’s “outstanding contributions” to China and “sincere affection for the Chinese people”. Such a visit, given extensive publicity in the official media, was almost unprecedented.

Epstein was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1915. Both of his parents were opponents of Tsarist rule under which Poland then laboured. When Israel was two, the Epsteins fled their homeland to avoid persecution, settling in Tianjin, the seaport of Beijing. In the early years of the last century, Tianjin, Harbin and Shanghai — all of which contained substantial foreign communities beyond the reach of the Chinese and, indeed, any government — were home to a large number of Jewish refugees.

Epstein attended US-run schools in Tianjin and, aged 15, began working as a journalist on the English-language Peking and Tientsin Times. By this time he had also arrived at the political views that would sustain him for the rest of his life. The influence of his radical parents and the evidence of the poverty afflicting many ordinary Chinese convinced him that China needed a revolution. The question was: who could lead it?

Many radicals, Chinese as well as foreign, believed that they found the answer during the late 1930s when Japan attacked China, exposing the inefficiency and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government. The situation seemed to be very different in Communist-controlled territory in north China, where Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De were understood to be building a new society based on patriotism, plain living and rural reform. This picture owed much to Edgar Snow, the American journalist, whose Red Star Over China was published in 1937. Epstein and Snow were friends; the latter showed Epstein Red Star in manuscript.

Thanks to his friendship with Song Qingling, widow of Sun Yat-sen and fierce opponent of Chiang, Epstein made his way to the Communists’ wartime headquarters of Yanan. During his visit, he helped to polish the first English language dispatch of the New China News Agency, then, as now, the voice of the Communist Government.

For much of the war, Epstein was part of the foreign press corps based in Chongqing (Chungking), Chiang’s temporary capital. By now he was working for UPI and the Allied Labor News as well as Time and, occasionally, The New York Times. Many reporters, disgusted with what they regarded as the Nationalists’ decrepitude and failure to rally China against the Japanese invaders, were keen to visit Yanan to see the war from another angle. The Nationalists objected, determined to starve their opponents of publicity as well as respectability.

However, in 1944 a group of reporters, including Epstein, finally secured permission to travel north. Once in Yanan, they were given what they believed to be unrestricted access to the Party’s leaders and the people over whom they ruled. The apparent differences between Yanan and Chongqing in spirit, openness and popular enthusiasm for the Government and the war made a deep impression on the visitors. It shone through the reporting that followed, helping to create myths about a Communist Camelot in the fastness of Shaanxi that historians, both Chinese and non-Chinese, have only recently begun to expose as false.

Epstein remained in Yanan for six months. He later declared that the conversations he held with Mao in a cave during this period “changed his life”.

After Yanan, Epstein and his British wife, Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley, spent five years in the United States, where he published The Unfinished Revolution in China (1947). He remained there until 1951, when Song Qingling, by now vice-president of the new Communist Government, invited him to return to Beijing and help to set up China Reconstructs, an English-language magazine designed to publicise the achievements of the new regime. Epstein and wife accepted, joining the ranks of the Beijing-based foreign friends and foreign experts, which included such figures as Rewi Alley (a New Zealander), George Hatem and Sidney Shapiro (both Americans), Ruth Weiss (a Jew born in Vienna) and Alan Winnington (a Briton).

There was much to do on the propaganda front. New China was in close alliance with the Soviet Union and largely cut off, diplomatically and economically, from the English-speaking world. Foreign friends helped to fashion a voluble English-language output, including, before long, translations of the works of Chairman Mao. The presence of such an international community also enabled the Communist Government to claim that it enjoyed wider recognition than that suggested by the relatively limited number of diplomats accredited to Beijing in the 1950s.

Many of the foreign friends, Epstein included, enjoyed far higher standards of living than most ordinary Chinese, from whom they tended to be cut off outside of the office. They also enjoyed greater access to the senior leadership, including Mao himself, with whom Epstein and others often talked at length during the 1950s.