Crook makes Beijing her home, where her three sons and two great-grandchildren were born.

They found themselves no longer observers, but "participants in the Chinese revolution at the grassroots level", Crook told the audience.

"We belonged. This is why we stayed."

The couple made their home in the Chinese capital, where their three sons were born, as well as two of their great-grandchildren.

Crook, born Isabel Brown to Canadian missionaries in Chengdu, discovered her own life's mission after meeting in 1940 the man who would become her husband.

"I thought: 'They (my parents) live a much better life than I do, because they had something.' So I wanted to find something to do, a cause," Crook says during the Beijing interview.

"I wrote to my mother and I said: 'Please send me some of those religious books so I could get a cause.

"I read them. I didn't get any cause. And it was just at that time that I met David Crook, and he was a communist. And when he talked ... I liked passion. I decided that my cause would be communism."

They were married in London in 1942. She joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, in which David was already a member.

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