Israel Epstein (1915–2005)

Israel Epstein was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, then Part of the Russian Empire. His father was sent by his employer to Japan after the outbreak of the World War I; when the German Army approached Warsaw, Israel's mother fled east with her two-year-old son and joined her husband in Asia. They settled in Tientsin (now Tianjin), China in 1920. Epstein began his journalism career at age 15, when he started to write for the Peking and Tientsin Times, an English-language newspaper. He covered the Japanese Invasion of China in 1937 for United Press and other Western news agencies. In 1941, he faked news about his own death to divert the Japanese who were hunting him. He spent time anonymously in a Japanese internment camp. He came to know Edgar Show after being assigned to review one of his books, and Snow showed him his classic work Red Star Over China before it was published. Epstein became an editor for Snow's magazine, Democracy. Soong Ching Ling, Sun Yat-sen's widow, arranged for Epstein to visit Mao Tsetung, Zhou Enlai, and their revolutionary comrades at their base in northwest China in 1944, and Epstein later said his conversations in a cave with Mao had changed his life. Later that year, Epstein first visited the UK and afterwards went to live in the USA for five years with his second wife, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley. There he worked for the Allied Labor News and published The Unfinished Revolution in China (1947). In 1951, the couple returned to China and he became editor of the magazine China Reconstructs, later renamed China Today, a position he held until his retirement. During these years, he became a Chinese citizen and a member of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, Epstein was imprisoned and held in solitary confinement. He was released after five years, with a personal apology from Zhou and a restoration of his privileges, and remained loyal to the Communist Party until his death. In 1955, 1965, and 1976, he visited Tibet, and based on these experiences published the book Tibet Transformed (1983). His autobiography My China Eye: Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist, appeared in 2005.