William Hinton, Author Who Studied Chinese Village Life, Dies at 85 May 22, 2004 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. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/international/asia/22HINT.html?ex=10862 48833&ei=1&en=428dffb9859b586a ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the Internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the Web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
