Women’s History Month: Harriet Mills

Harriet Mills, Scholar Held in ‘Brainwashing Prison’ in China, Dies at 95

By SAM ROBERTS MARCH 29, 2016

Harriet Mills in an undated photo made available by her sister. After returning from captivity in China, she taught Chinese language and literature at Columbia, Cornell and the University of Michigan.

Harriet Mills, a Fulbright scholar from New York who was imprisoned as an American spy in Communist China for more than four years and was widely believed to have been a victim of brainwashing, died on March 5 in Mitchelville, Md. She was 95.

The cause was complications of dementia, said her sister, Angie, her only immediate survivor.

When she was released in 1955, Ms. Mills described herself as an unpaid “espionage agent” for the United States and Britain, called Americans “warmongers” and said she believed that the United States had engaged in germ warfare during the Korean War.

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Ms. Mills later wrote a magazine article saying the Chinese government was engaged in the “greatest campaign in human history to reshape the minds of men.”

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1959, she said the “complex interplay of psychological and personal factors gives the technique its special character and power,” and concluded that “to be unprogressive in China is not simply a political verdict; it is social suicide as well.”

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