WILLIAM HINTON was born in Chicago in 1919. He was raised by his mother because his father passed away when William was still a child. After graduating from high school, Hinton took a trip to the Far East by way of Japan, Korea, and northeast China , and that was his first contact with China. Upon returning to the United States, Bill Hinton entered Harvard for two years, but he eventually graduated from Cornell with a degree in agriculture.1.

    Edgar Snow’s book, Red Star over China, one of the classic books that gave a vivid portrait of the Chinese revolution and its leaders, changed Hinton’s life after he read it in 1942. He was so fascinated with the story of the country and its people that he eventually returned to China as a staff member of the U.S. Office of War Information in 1945, and subsequently as a tractor instructor under the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in China under the Guomindang [the Nationalist Party] regime. Thoroughly disgusted with the systemic corruption of Guomindang, he soon left the area, and having found the honest government he was hoping for in China, he crossed over to the liberated territory under Communist rule.2.

    In 1948, Hinton became a member of a land reform work team working in a village called Zhang, which he renamed as Long Bow by breaking down the Chinese character. Long Bow was a typical village in northern China before liberation. For eight months, he participated in all the phases of the land reform programs, and the way he lived was like ordinary Chinese peasants, who had lived in dire conditions most of their lives. After all, they were the landless peasants, laboring tirelessly for the rich landlords to obtain a meager existence. They had no health care and no educational opportunities; most of them were illiterate, and they were the poorest people in the world. Bill Hinton lived among them, and he witnessed the essence of the Chinese Revolution. He taught the peasants to read, became their friend, and came to understand their needs and aspirations. He attended meetings and helped them overcome their problems in the process of land reform and democratic elections of the village council. At the same time, he took all kinds of notes on his experience in the Long Bow village. These notes turned out to be the materials he used to write his internationally acclaimed book, Fanshen, which became a best-seller in the United States and was translated into ten languages. The book won immediate recognition as one of the classics of the Chinese Revolution. As Martin Bernal of the British New Statesman wrote, “Fanshen gives details of the changing social and economic structure of his village. The descriptions alone make this book one of the two classics of the Chinese revolution, the other being [Edgar Snow’s] Red Star over China.”3.

    The late Joseph Needham, the distinguished China scholar from Cambridge University , praised the book as “an epic; one of the most important books about China which has been written since the Revolution. For anyone who wants to understand anything about the Chinese revolution of our time, the reading of this book is an absolute necessity.”4.

    When Bill Hinton returned to the United States in the mist of the Korean conflict in 1953, his notes on the Chinese land reforms were seized by the U.S. Customs and turned over to the U.S. Senate Committee on Internal Security headed by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. Hinton launched a legal action to recover his notes, and in order to pay for the legal fee, he held Chinese chiaozi (dumpling) parties to raise money.5.

    He adopted a confrontational attitude in the Senate Committee hearing, as he said later that he took Mao’s advice that “a hungry tiger is going to attack you if you provoke him or not.” This tactic was totally different from the one taken by the Hollywood Ten, a group of screen writers who appeared before Senator McCarthy’s Committee: they all went to jail because they used the First Amendment.6.

    Before the hearing, Hinton did due diligence research on the chairman of this committee and found that Senator Eastland was the largest landlord in Mississippi with two thousand tenants, and that he had been involved in unsavory dealings back home. Eastland had been elected with only about thirty thousand votes since blacks could not vote at that time.7.

    In the first day of hearing, with full TV network coverage, Hinton confronted Senator Eastland by saying that “the chairman of this committee is doing more to threaten the internal security of the United States than anybody else.” The Senator was shocked and embarrassed by this remark, and he immediately moved the hearing to a smaller room without TV coverage the next day. On the third day, the hearing was moved to the attic of a small building without the press being notified. The senators were no match for Hinton’s eloquence and irrefutable facts.

    Hinton eventually recovered the notes after a long process lasting six years; he finally went to court and forced the government to release them to him. But in the meantime, the FBI constantly harassed him, his passport was seized, and he could not go back to China. He was blacklisted and denied teaching or other employment. He worked as a truck mechanic, and later he took up farming for fifteen years. But he lectured across America and gave several hundred talks about China, responding to the fact that ordinary Americans were hungry for the news about that country.

    When his book was published, it became an instant best seller, and playwright David Hare staged Fanshen in London, and then all over the world. Hinton returned to China at the invitation of Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971. When he came back to Long Bow, the place he left in the 1950s, he found a vastly different village. The people were well fed and provided with education and medical care. He noted, “The contrast between the medical system of 1971 and that of 1948 was striking. If there had been progress in no other field, the progress here would have justified the revolution.” In Long Bow, he introduced the local peasants to new agricultural techniques. He is recognized as an expert in Chinese agriculture both in and outside of China, and the Chinese still regard him as a friend of China because he devoted so much of his time to Chinese agriculture, helping the poor peasants achieve a better life. In 2002, when Hinton was ill at a nursing home in the United States, the mayor of Long Bow made a special trip from China to visit him, and presented him with a beautiful pictorial book titled William Hinton: An Old Friend of Chinese People that had been published especially in his honor.8.

    After Deng came to power, Hinton served as an agricultural consultant and spent five to six months in China every year but one after 1978. In the 1970s, Hinton was critical of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and he supported Deng’s reform and the new government after the death of Mao. But he changed his view, explaining that when Mao talked about capitalist roaders, he didn’t know what it meant. He later blamed himself for such an oversight, based on the fact that he came from a capitalist country, the United States. But after ten years in China, where he studied the changes in China’s countryside, he realized the serious implications of employing capitalism as a means of development in China. His experience proved that Mao’s strategy had been correct, and Hinton explained it this way: “I did not leap from defender to critic overnight however. As an old friend of New China living abroad, I was certainly free to speak out. But at the beginning of the reform period, I consciously avoided passing hasty judgment. I decided, with uncharacteristic forbearance, to wait and see what the new regime, with most of the old heroes gone, would do. My particular concern was of course, the countryside.” 9.10.

    Accordingly, in his later book, The Great Reversal, he described the restoration of capitalism in China’s farming sectors: the dismantling of collective agriculture, the re-division of the land into thin slivers, the abandonment of mechanization and the infrastructure decay, environmental degradation, social disintegration, cultural malaise, imposition of the so-called family responsibility system, and the falsehoods about the “successes” of agricultural reforms and the notion that the Cultural Revolution was a “catastrophe.”

    He particularly took issue with the reformers’ policy of destroying one of Mao’s revolutionary legacies, the cooperatives in the countryside, and the give-away liquidations of collective property and assets. He recorded these observations: “When the time came to distribute collective assets, people with influence and connections were able to buy, at massive discounts, the tractors, trucks, and other productive property that the collectives have accumulated over decades through the hard labor of all members. Not only did the buyers manage to set low prices for these capital assets (often one third or less of their true value) but they often bought them with easy credit from state banks and then in the end, often failed to pay what they had promised. It is doubtful if in the history of the world, any privileged group ever acquired more for less. The scale of these transactions and the depth of the injury done to the average coop member boggle the mind.”11.

    It was astonishing that this happened in China, and it was not much different from the Yeltsin privatization of Russia. This is a complete betrayal of Chinese peasants. What a tragedy for China.

    Bill Hinton was a passionate man. His attitude toward China was characterized by his unwavering concern for the welfare of the Chinese people, particularly the peasantry, which makes up for the vast majority of the Chinese people. He always insisted on the truth, and the truth had to be derived from fact. He had no hesitation in criticizing China’s leaders. He always maintained an independent and critical analysis, which is so valuable to the understanding of China, especially the understanding of Chinese villages.

    He said “[the] newly constituted bureaucratic capitalists [are] busy carving the economy into gigantic family fiefs, ready in true comprador style, to sell China out to the highest bidder.” He said Mao foresaw long ago that this was going to happen,…” Hinton further added, “The Cultural Revolution unleashed action and counteraction, initiative and counter-initiative, encirclement and counter-encirclement, all sorts of excesses, leftist and rightist, and an overall situation that spun out of anyone’s control. To blame Mao alone for the disruptions caused by this struggle, for the setbacks and disasters that ensued, is equivalent to the Guomindang blaming the Communists for the disruptions of China’s liberation war.”12.

    With his many years of experience in Chinese agriculture and with his knowledge of the cooperative farming in China, he had a high opinion of its accomplishment before reform.

    “Cooperatives should be judged on their accomplishments, which were considerable, and on their potential, which was enormous, since they provide the scale and the infrastructure for the modernization and mechanization of the Chinese countryside, a development that has been severely hampered if not totally aborted by the family-contract system.”13.

    Unlike many academics in the West, Hinton had a high esteem for Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and he paid tribute to Mao for building “an economy from scratch under fierce foreign embargo to a point where it is strong enough to deal with Western multinational businesses on equal terms and capable of setting parameters for foreign participation that are favorable to China and not simply the first step toward renewed neo-colonial status and eventual debt peonage.”14.

    Hinton also said, “Mao’s greatest contribution to revolutionary theory and practice, lights the way to progress in our time. Had Mao succeeded, I think there is no doubt we would have today a burgeoning socialist economy and culture in China with enormous prestige among the people. The economic advance might be slower than the current one but it would be much more solid and much more useful as a development model for all third world peoples now living in abysmal poverty and exploitation.”15.

    Similarly, he thought highly of the Chinese farmers, the people whom he knew so well. “The Chinese are an energetic, dynamic, creative people. They have a long revolutionary history and large reserves of revolutionary consciousness and motivation.”16.

    William Hinton died in 2004, at the age of 84. Before he passed away, he learned with great satisfaction that all those villages in China that experienced general prosperity were the ones that had followed Mao’s line of cooperative development and had resisted the pressure put on them, and their income had increased many times. At the same time, he was also saddened by the situation of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants, who either had fled to cities to work in sweatshops for a meager existence in factories owned by foreigners, or had been relegated to poverty and were in dire straits.