[Marxism] Bill Hinton

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, May 22, 2004
William Hinton, Author Who Studied Chinese Village Life, Dies at 85
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

William H. Hinton, whose accounts of Chinese village life helped shape 
America's understanding of Mao Zedong's revolution, died last Saturday 
at a nursing home in Concord, Mass., where he had been living for 
several years. He was 85.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Catherine Jean 
Hinton.

His books "Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village" 
(Monthly Review Press, 1966) and "Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in 
a Chinese Village" (Random House, 1983), about the impact of the 1949 
revolution on a village where he worked, were widely read and remained 
required reading for generations of university students over the decades.

The books offered an authentic — if, some critics said, an occasionally 
overromantic — peek at the patterns of life for the peasants in whose 
name the revolution was fought. His writing offered a sympathetic 
account of Communist China at a time when America was deeply 
anti-Communist, which led to a 14-year delay of the publication of 
"Fanshen."

Mr. Hinton captured gritty details of the impact of the revolution on 
the traditional way of life and the resistance to change in Long Bow, in 
southeastern Shaanxi Province. He explained, for example, the struggles 
of elected councils to replace the old magistrates who ran the village. 
He described how individual villagers "hopefully placed" the family 
privy "at the edge of the public road in anticipation of a contribution 
to the domestic store of fertilizer from any traveler who might be in 
need of relief."

The books also touched on the beginning of Mr. Hinton's own gradual 
disillusionment with the progress of the revolution. He summed up his 
later conclusions in a series of essays, which were collected in "The 
Great Reversal: The Privatization of China" (Monthly Review Press, 1990).

This disillusionment came too late to avoid the trouble he faced at the 
height of the McCarthy era, which led to the confiscation of his notes 
on Fanshen, the loss of his passport, his blacklisting from employment 
and his being called up before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal 
Security, led by Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi.

William Howard Hinton was born Feb. 2, 1919, in Chicago, the second 
child and only son of Sebastian Hinton, a lawyer, and Carmelita Chase 
Hinton, an educator who founded The Putney School, in Putney, Vt.

Mr. Hinton was in the first class to attend Putney and graduated in 
1936. Accepted at Harvard, he postponed college and instead traveled in 
the Far East, supporting himself with odd jobs. He attended Harvard from 
1937 to 1939, then transferred to Cornell and in 1941 took a bachelor of 
science degree in agronomy and dairy husbandry.

In 1945 he married Bertha Sneck, a translator and editor. They had one 
child, Carmelita, now a documentary filmmaker in Brookline, Mass. The 
marriage ended in divorce in 1954. In 1959 he married Joanne Raiford, a 
metallurgical technician, with whom he had three children, Michael 
Howard, of Reading, Pa.; Alyssa Anne, of Carrboro, N.C.; and Catherine 
Jean, of Arlington, Mass. Ms. Raiford died in 1986, and the following 
year Mr. Hinton married Katherine Chiu, an employee of Unicef, who 
survives him, along with his first wife, his four children, two 
stepchildren and three grandchildren.

With high hopes for the Chinese revolution, Mr. Hinton returned to China 
during World War II as a propaganda analyst for the Office of War 
Information, and then again in 1947 as a tractor technician for the 
United Nations. When the United Nations program ended he stayed on as an 
English teacher and land-reform adviser in Fanshen, where he took more 
than 1,000 pages of notes on what he saw.

When his passport expired, he returned to the United States in 1953, and 
his troubles began. After the Eastland Committee held hearings on him 
and pronounced the trunk full of papers they had taken from him to be 
"the autobiography of a traitor," he worked as a truck mechanic in 
Philadelphia until he was blacklisted, then took up farming in 
Fleetwood, Pa., on land that his mother owned.

All the while he kept up a legal battle to recover his notes and papers. 
When he finally won, he set about writing "Fanshen." In 1971, after the 
book was translated into Chinese, Zhou Enlai invited him to visit China 
again, and he resumed his work as an agricultural adviser. Besides 
revisiting Long Bow, he continued to write and lecture on Chinese and 
Mongolian culture, and to consult for various Chinese and United Nations 
agricultural organizations.


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