William
H. Hinton, who illuminated the gigantic strides of Socialist China
secured under Chairman Mao, died 20 years ago on May 15th,
2004, at a nursing home in Concord, Mass. He was 85. Katherine
survives him, as do Carmelita, and two daughters and one son from his
second marriage.
His
writings illustrated Mao’s China shaping the most path breaking
experiments and how autonomy of workers and peasants surpassed level
of any Western Democracy or third world country.
No
author better diagnosed and projected the symmetry of historical
periods from the land reform movements of the CPC in the
pre-revolutionary period of the 1940’s to later stages of the Great
Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and how revolutionary
democracy escalated zones untranscended.
Life
History
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.
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.
Over
the course of the next year, he compiled a thousand pages of notes,
with pin point detail, on the struggle waged against landlords and
between different categories 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".
Infuriated
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. Landing in southern Shanxi province
teaching English. When his students marched off to join the land
reform movement, he demanded to take part.
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.
When
his passport expired, he returned to the United States in 1953, but
was now hounded by the authorities. After the Eastland Committee
tried him and declared 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.
When
he returned to the United States in 1953, his notes were confiscated
by the senate internal security committee. He retrieved them after 5
years. -Hinton organized Chinese dumpling parties to pay for the
legal fees - and then eight years to publish Fanshen.
With
high resilience he waged a legal battle to recover his notes and
papers. When he finally won, he embarked on 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.
Returning
to China in the heat and backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, and to
Long Bow, would take another five years, with the support of the
country's deputy leader Zhou Enlai,
After
the death of Mao and ascendancy of capitalist roaders from
1976.Hinton was bitterly critical of the gang of four and supported
their arrest and CPC coup.
In
the 1980s, as the post-Mao Zedong regime dismantled the people's
communes, Hinton relentlessly backed the cooperative way. He was
terrified with the redivision of the land into thin strips calling it
"noodle strip farming which in his view violated Marxism.
In
the mid 1980’s Hinton drifted from his earlier stand and became
critical of the practice of the Cultural revolution, classifying it
as a factional struggle, with Mao seeking power.
In
1993, on the 100th anniversary of Mao's birth, in a tea party in
Beijing, where retired cadres from the ministry of culture sang
nostalgic songs about the revolution.
Writing
in the US Marxist journal Monthly Review, Hinton charged the late
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping of having reverted “from the socialist
road to the capitalist road".
Hinton
was highly disturbed by the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which
he was a first hand witness to, driving through the suburbs of
Beijing to monitor 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 .In 1995 in an interview he most analytically or
logically dissected every element of Mao’s political career, to
give a knockout punch to the vilification of Mao Tse Tung as a
dictator. Hinton dwelled into why it was imperative for Mao to wage
political struggle against the line of Liu Shao Chi and Deng
Xiaoping, to defend the political power of the working class. Hinton
underlined why the Cultural Revolution as a whole was a great
creative departure in history and not a plot, not a purge, but a
mass mobilization whereby people were inspired to come to the party
and supervise their cadres and form new popular committees to
exercise control at the grassroots and higher.
Writing
in the US Marxist journal Monthly Review in 1995, Hinton charged the
late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping of having reverted “from the
socialist road to the capitalist road". It seemed idealistic at
the time in harmony with Hinton’s endorsement of the cultural
revolution in Turning Point In China (1972) .
Hinton
toured different parts of the world to express his solidarity with
revolutionary movements. During the final years of his life, he felt
it was his duty to uphold the Chinese revolution combating the
attacks and distortions waged against it. In writings and lectures
given around the world, he upheld Mao’s revolutionary approach to
land reform and collectivization. He played a major role in
countering the bourgeoisie's ideological offensive against communism.
Head
on he battled the slanders directed at the Great Leap Forward and
Mao's agricultural policies, and relentlessly refuted vilification of
the Cultural Revolution. This was an important contribution to the
battle to countering the bourgeoisie's ideological offensive against
communism.
Fanshen
and Other Books
