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William Hinton | |
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| Born | February 2, 1919 |
| Died | May 15, 2004 (aged 85) Concord, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | Cornell University (BS) |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, political scientist |
| Movement | Maoism |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 4, includingCarma |
| Mother | Carmelita Hinton |
| Relatives | Charles Hinton (grandfather) Ethel Voynich (great-aunt) Joan Hinton (sister) |
William Howard Hinton (Chinese:韩丁;pinyin:Hán Dīng; February 2, 1919 – May 15, 2004) was an American intellectual, known for his work on communism in China. He authored the bookFanshen, published in 1966, a "documentary of revolution" which chronicled theland reform program of theChinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1940s inZhangzhuangcun (张庄村, pinyin: Zhāngzhuāngcūn), sometimes translated as Long Bow Village, a village inShanxi Province innorthern China.[1] Sequels (Shenfan) followed the experience of the village during the 1950s andCultural Revolution. Hinton wrote and lectured extensively to explain theMaoist approach and later to criticizeDeng Xiaoping'smarket-orient reforms.
Hinton was born on February 2, 1919, inChicago.[1] His great-grandfather was the mathematicianGeorge Boole, his grandfather was the mathematicianCharles Howard Hinton, and his father, Sebastian Hinton, was a lawyer who invented the playgroundjungle gym[2][3] before later committing suicide.[4] His mother,Carmelita Hinton, was an educator and the founder ofThe Putney School, an independent progressive school inVermont. His great-aunt was novelistEthel Lilian Voynich (1864–1960), whose 1897 bookThe Gadfly sold over a million copies and became the number one American bestseller in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Hinton's sister,Joan Hinton, was a physicist who worked on theManhattan Project inLos Alamos, New Mexico before moving toBeijing and becoming aMaoist.[5][6]
Hinton attendedHarvard University for two years, where he was captain of the ski team. In 1939, he raced the famous Inferno race from the summit ofMount Washington, skiing behindToni Matt, who famouslyschussed theheadwall. Hinton commented in 1996 that "he knew Matt did something special, as a huge roar came up from the crowd." Hinton earned a Bachelor of Science degree in agronomy and dairy husbandry fromCornell University in 1941.[7]
Hinton first visitedChina in 1937. At the time, prevailing U.S. views of the Chinese Communist Party since the 1920s had alternated between uncertainty and hostility. Most U.S. "experts" oncommunism were baffled by the appeal of aMarxist-Leninist party to Asianpeasants. Some diplomats considered the Chinese Communist Party "agrarian reformers" who labeled themselves revolutionaries. They were uncertain whether or how closely the Communists were tied to theSoviet Union.[citation needed]
Given the attention lavished on theKuomintang (KMT) by both U.S. PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt and the media, especiallyHenry Luce'sTime Magazine, the U.S. public was slow to take notice of the Communists' rise in importance in China. When the U.S. joined China and the otherAllied Powers of theSecond World War in the War againstJapan, there had been little contact between U.S. diplomats and the CCP, even though the KMT-ledUnited Front against Japan made the Communists an implicit ally.[citation needed]
At the time of Hinton's first visit to China in the mid-1930s, a handful of U.S. journalists, such asEdgar Snow,Helen Foster Snow, andOwen Lattimore, had sneaked through the KMT blockade into communist territory. All praised the high morale, social reform, and commitment to fighting Japan that they observed.[citation needed]
Along with academic colleagues, Hinton made similar observations when he served from 1945 to 1953 during his subsequent visit to China. Hinton was a staff member of the U.S.Office of War Information and was present at theChongqing negotiations between theKuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, where he metZhou Enlai andMao Zedong.[citation needed]
Hinton then worked for theUnited Nations as a tractor-technician, providing training in modern agricultural methods in rural China.[8] When the United Nations program in the communist-led area ended in 1947, he accepted a position teaching at a Party-run university.[8] Shortly thereafter, roughly half the faculty and staff left to join land reform work teams.[8] Hinton asked to join the university-staffed work team going to the village of Zhang Zhuang (now popularly rendered in English as Long Bow, due to Hinton's writing), which was within walking distance of the university[8] and on the outskirts of Changzhi. By 1948, his then-wifeBertha Sneck had also joined him in China.
Hinton spent eight months working in the fields in the day and attending land reform meetings both day and night, and during this time he took careful notes on the land reform process. He assisted in the development of mechanized agriculture and education, and mainly stayed in the CCP-governed northern Chinese village of Changzhi, forging close bonds with the inhabitants. Hinton aided the locals with complicated CCP initiatives, especially literacy projects, the breaking up of the feudal estates, ensuring the equality of women, and the replacement of the imperial-era magistrates that governed the village with councils in a symbiotic relationship with the landed gentry class. Hinton took more than one thousand pages of notes during his time in China.[citation needed]
On his return to the United States after the conclusion of theKorean War in 1953, Hinton wanted to chronicle his observations of the revolutionary process in Long Bow. But on his return, at the height ofMcCarthyism, customs officials seized his papers, and turned them over to the Senate Committee on Internal Security (chaired by SenatorJames Eastland). Hinton was subjected to continual harassment by theFBI, his passport was confiscated, and he was barred from all teaching jobs.[9] At first permitted to work as a truck mechanic, he was later blacklisted and denied all employment. He then took up farming on some land inherited from his mother, and farmed for a living for some fifteen years. During this period Hinton continued to speak out about the successes of theChinese Communist Revolution and waged a long (and eventually successful) legal battle to recover his notes and papers from the Eastland Committee.[citation needed]
After the government returned his notes and papers, Hinton set to writingFanshen, a documentary account of the land reform in Long Bow village in which he had been both observer and participant. After many mainstream U.S. publishers had turned it down, it was published in 1966 byMonthly Review and was a success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, with translations in ten languages. In the book, Hinton examines the revolutionary experience of the Long Bow village, painting a complex picture of conflict, contradiction and cooperation in rural China. Hinton's book did not shy away from discussing the violence of land reform in Long Bow.[10] In Hinton's view, peasant liberation justified class struggle.[10]
After the death ofEdgar Snow, Hinton became the most famous of Americans sympathetic to the People's Republic of China, and he served as the first national chairman of theUS–China Peoples Friendship Association from 1974 to 1976.[citation needed] The association published his interviews with Chinese premierZhou Enlai.[11] Hinton cooled toward official policy as market reforms underDeng Xiaoping moved away from the type of socialism originally associated with Mao Zedong. Eventually, he wroteShenfan (read as the opposite ofFanshen) andThe Great Reversal, and became an outspoken opponent of thesocialist market economy ("socialism with Chinese characteristics") andChinese economic reform that the CCP continues today.[citation needed]
In 1945, Hinton marriedBertha Sneck, a writer and translator. They had one daughter,Carma Hinton, an academic and documentary filmmaker.[12][13] Hinton and Sneck divorced in 1954. In 1958, Hinton married Joanne Raiford, a metallurgical technician, and had three more children. Raiford died in 1986, and Hinton married Katherine Chiu, an employee ofUNICEF, in 1987.[citation needed]
In 2004, Hinton died inConcord, Massachusetts at the age of 85.[14]
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