Few journalists in the 20th century had a career as unusual as Israel Epstein: born to Jewish parents in Warsaw, raised in China, a committed Communist, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and eventually one of the country’s most prominent foreign-born political figures. Epstein was born in 1915 in Warsaw and arrived in China with his family when he was just two years old. He grew up in Tianjin and began working as a journalist while still a teenager.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, he reported on China and developed close ties with the Chinese Communist movement. His relationship with the Communist Party deepened after he visited the Communist base at Yan’an, where he reported on Mao Zedong's movement. Chinese state records later described Epstein as a foreign-born Communist who helped bring the party's message to the English-speaking world.
Epstein eventually became one of the rare foreign-born members of the Chinese Communist Party. He obtained Chinese citizenship in 1957 and formally joined the CCP in 1964. He later became a member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
His work also put him unusually close to Mao's political project. In the early 1960s, Epstein was part of a team of Chinese and foreign scholars working on English translations and revisions of Mao Zedong's Selected Works. The group included several foreign-born Jewish intellectuals who had committed themselves to the Chinese Communist cause.
But Epstein's loyalty to the Communist system did not protect him from the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, during Mao's campaign of political purges, Epstein was arrested on allegations of plotting against Premier Zhou Enlai. He spent several years imprisoned before being released in 1973.
According to biographical accounts, Zhou later apologized to him, and Epstein's political privileges were restored. What makes Epstein's story particularly striking is that imprisonment did not lead him to abandon communism. Academic research into his life describes him as a fervent supporter and defender of the Cultural Revolution even after experiencing its repression personally.
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