William Hinton : Eyewitness to the revolution in a Chinese village

The Guardian UK

By John Gittings

The Guardian William Hinton, who has died aged 85, was
the author of Fanshen, a classic account of the Chinese
revolution, but, first and last, he was a farmer. He
ended his working career in Mongolia, adapting clapped-
out Russian equipment to grow experimental barley on
virgin land. And it was as a tractor technician in
north China nearly 60 years ago that he gathered
material for Fanshen, his brilliant documentary study
of revolution in a Chinese village. Published in 1966,
it became a play of the same name by David Hare in
1975.

Hinton was born in Chicago, and was educated at the
Putney school, a progressive establishment founded by
his mother in Vermont, before setting off to explore
the world for a year, during which he visited China.
After two years at Harvard, he graduated in agronomy
and dairy husbandry from Cornell University in 1941. In
1947, he was sent by the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration to teach farmers in the
Chinese province of Hebei.

Outraged at the corruption of the Kuomintang
nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, Hinton
crossed to a zone already liberated by the communists
in the civil war. Soon, he was in southern Shanxi
province teaching English. When his students marched
off to join the land reform movement, he demanded to
take part.

Over the course of the next year, he gathered a
thousand pages of notes, packed with earthy detail, on
the struggle against landlords - and between different
strata of peasants - in the village of Long Bow. Much
later, he would recall "the lice, the fleas and all the
hardships, and eating that terrible gruel out of an
unwashed bowl while a young girl lay dying of
tuberculosis".

When the Kuomintang attacked in 1948, he joined the
retreat with the notes in his backpack. A year later,
he was able to witness Mao Zedong’s triumph.

Hinton was fortunate to have been able to study the
communist-led revolution at a time when the Chinese
peasantry was finding its voice, and before the
official line had become distant from reality. As one
villager, quoted by Hinton, observed after a long
quarrel over who should have the landlord’s cart, "only
through hot argument can we get at the truth".

Fanshen recreates this painful, but exhilarating,
exercise in mass participation. It ends on a triumphant
note as China’s peasants march down the long road to
fanshen (literally, turn over one’s body) or
emancipation.

But for Hinton, and the peasants too, it was not so
simple. When he returned to the United States in 1953,
his notes were impounded by the senate internal
security committee. It took five years to get them back
– Hinton organised Chinese dumpling parties to pay for
the legal fees - and then eight years to publish
Fanshen.

Returning to China, by then in the grip of the cultural
revolution, and to Long Bow, would take another five
years. But with the support of the country’s deputy
leader Zhou Enlai, Hinton was able to gather another
thousand pages of notes, also from Long Bow, on a much
more complex story.

In spite of the excesses of the great leap forward and
the disastrous factional fighting of the cultural
revolution, he still saw it as a story of success,
which he told in his second book, Shenfan (1983). Long
Bow’s peasants, he concluded, had "learned to work
together [and] pooled land, livestock and implements to
create a viable cooperative".

In the 1980s, as the post-Mao Zedong regime abolished
the people’s communes, Hinton remained a firm advocate
of the cooperative way. He deplored the redivision of
the land into thin slivers, calling it "noodle strip
farming". Hinton believed in Maoism at its best - the
ideal of "putting public first and oneself second". In
1993, on the 100th anniversary of Mao’s birth, I
accompanied him to a tea party in Beijing, where
retired cadres from the ministry of culture sang
nostalgic songs about the revolution. Hinton leapt on
the stage and sang too - the Song Of Nanniwan
celebrating the mountain village where the peoples’
liberation army had grown its own food.

Writing in the US Marxist journal Monthly Review,
Hinton accused the new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping of
having shifted "from the socialist road to the
capitalist road". It seemed over-simple at the time -
like Hinton’s earlier enthusiasm for the cultural
revolution in Turning Point In China (1972) - though
most would now agree that socialism is dead there.

Hinton was always on firmer ground when dealing with
rural realities. In a study on poverty alleviation,
written for Unicef in 1991, he identified many of
today’s rural problems as the gap widens between rich
and poor. "Now that the cooperative fabric has been
torn up," he wrote, "every family is on its own." He
warned that rural taxes would increase while prices for
agricultural products declined, anticipating the crisis
now, where millions have abandoned the land.

Hinton was deeply disillusioned by the Tiananmen Square
massacre in 1989, which he observed on the spot,
driving through the suburbs of Beijing to check on the
advance of the army. His daughter by his first
marriage, Carmelita Hinton, born and educated in China,
later co-produced The Gate Of Heavenly Peace (1996) - a
challenging film about the massacre.

In 1995, Hinton moved to Mongolia with his third wife
Katherine Chiu, when she was appointed to the Unicef
office in Ulan Bator. He lectured on no-till farming -
the technique of leaving the soil untouched from
planting to harvest, which he had developed on his own
farm in Pennsylvania - and proudly announced that he
had "grown a prolific vegetable garden for home use".

Katherine survives him, as do Carmelita, and two
daughters and one son from his second marriage.

· William Howard Hinton, agronomist and writer, born
February 2 1919; died May 15 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1223250,00.html