Great man and Chinese loyal friend Willianm H. Hinton passed away. He will be remembered by China forever.
Obituary of William Hinton
William Howard Hinton died on May 15, 2004 at Rivercrest nursing home
in Concord, Massachusetts. Hinton was born on February 2, 1919, in Chicago,
Illinois, and grew up in New England (Massachusetts and Vermont). He
graduated in 1936 from the Putney School in Putney, Vermont, a progressive
independent school founded by his mother, Carmelita C. Hinton.
While in high school, he participated in a mountain expedition in British
Columbia, where he helped map territory and climbed the previously unclimbed
peak, Mount Silverthrone. He wrote a book, Climbing Silverthrone (unpublished)
in 1936, about the experience.
He was accepted to Harvard University in 1936, at age 17, but decided
to take a year off and explore the world. He started out in Vermont,
hitchhiking across the country, sleeping in box cars and supporting himself
with jobs such as dishwasher at a boarding house and brick cleaner at
a construction site. In the spring of 1937 he got a job as machine boy
aboard a ship bound for Japan from San Francisco.
While in Japan, from April to August 1937, he was a feature reporter covering
Tokyo for the Japan Advertiser, the New York Times of the east. He traveled
through the Northeastern provinces of China, then under Japanese occupation,
and then rode the Trans-Siberian Railroad into the Soviet Union, surviving
on a loaf of bread and several cans of pineapple. He then traveled through
Europe and worked on a ship back to the US.
After returning from his trip around the world, he attended Harvard University.
In 1938, as a freshman he won the Briggs Prize in History for the best
essay in the mid-year exam, and published a short story “Home coming,”
in the undergraduate literary magazine, the Harvard Advocate. His diary
of his adventures around the world was serialized in the Boston Globe
(starting on March 28, 1938), entitled “Around the World on Nothing a
Day.” Although he thrived at Harvard, he felt that he was too far away
from “the real world”.
In 1939, Hinton transferred to Cornell University to study agriculture.
He continued to pursue his interest in literature, serving as editor
of Cornell’s undergraduate literary magazine Aereopagus, from 1940 to
1941.
After graduating in 1941, he worked in various farm jobs and wrote for
Yankee magazine, The Compass magazine and the New York Times (a column
on the campaign in North Africa for Hansen Baldwin).
In 1943, William Hinton worked in a public service camp in New Hampshire
for conscientious objectors to World War Two. He was at that time a pacifist
who thought all wars were wrong. After reading Edgar Snow’s Red Star
Over China, however, he changed his views. He decided that some wars
were just wars and had to be fought. As the US and China were allies
in the fight against Japan, he volunteered for the armed services. Hinton
was rejected because of a perforated eardrum, but still found his way
to China in 1945 as a propaganda analyst for the State Department’s Office
of War Information, under Owen Lattimore. During the second half of 1945,
he served as the American delegate to the United Nations Picture News
Office, writing, editing, and producing film strips for distribution in
China. He was in Chungking during the talks between the Communist and
Nationalist governments and met many key figures, including Mao Zedong,
Zhou Enlai, and Madame Sun Yat-sen.
After returning to the US in 1946, he served as assistant to the editor
of the journal, Facts for Farmers, in New York, and worked as an organizer
for the National Farmers Union. He wrote articles for the Farmers Defender,
a publication of the Dairy Farmers Union of New York, as well as for the
China Weekly Review, Shanghai.
He went back to China in 1947 as a tractor technician with the United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which provided
aid to both Nationalist and Communist held areas. After the UN project
ended, he stayed on in Communist held North China and taught English.
In 1948 he spent six months as an observer attached to a land reform
work-team in Long Bow Village in Shanxi province. Hinton took more than
one thousand pages of notes about what he saw, a world literally “turned
upside down.” He stayed on in China after the founding of the People’
s Republic of China in 1949 and worked as an instructor for mechanized
agriculture.
Hinton returned to the United States in 1953 – right into the teeth of
McCarthyism. He was blacklisted and was denied a passport for 15 years.
The US Customs seized his notes on land reform in China, and the Senate
investigated him. In 1956, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security
held three days of hearings on Hinton. He researched the senators’ records,
and when acting chairman Herman Welker of Idaho said that the foot locker
he had brought back from China contained “a mass of material out to destroy
the United States,” Hinton countered with allegations of ties between
Walker and the underworld. When a senator said Hinton was a threat to
national security, he replied that the committee should investigate chairman
James Eastland of Mississippi, “who has been organizing defiance of the
Supreme Court’s civil rights orders in the South. That’s very dangerous
to our security.” In the end, the subcommittee impounded the foot locker
of notes. Eastland later took to the Senate floor to call Hinton’s papers
“the autobiography of a traitor.”
Hinton finally recovered his papers in 1958 through a court suit. From
his notes taken nearly ten years earlier, he wrote the book Fanshen, on
land reform in Long Bow, a small village in Shanxi province in northern
China.
Despite enthusiastic readers’ reports and scholarly recommendations,
Fanshen was rejected by mainstream publishers. It was finally published
in 1966 by Monthly Review Press, and has since become a classic, required
reading for college courses in Chinese history, politics, and anthropology.
Reviews for Fanshen include:
“This is a different kind of book about the Chinese revolution… It provides
us with a vivid and compelling ‘grass-roots’ account of life in the
village precisely during the period in which the new Communist power was
establishing itself. Mr. Hinton has made valuable and in some ways unique
contributions to our understanding of life in a northern Chinese village
on the eve of the Communist takeover.” —Benjamin Schwartz, New York
Times Book Review
“Fanshen is an important book… It is an arresting narrative. It tells
the agonizing story of rural China in turmoil, when human feelings were
at their most acute. And it is told with a remarkable evenness of temper
and a rare understanding of human weaknesses and strengths. The lesson
of Long Bow village, so movingly and compassionately recorded by Mr. Hinton,
should be studied and restudied by all who have a personal concern for
the future of the majority of mankind.” —C.T. Hu, Saturday Review
Having been blacklisted from his previous work as a truck mechanic and
barred from all teaching jobs, Hinton took up farming in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania,
on land bought by his mother after she retired from the Putney School.
He farmed for a living for sixteen years. While living in Pennsylvania
he participated in many progressive causes in the United States. He
was especially active in the Civil Rights movement, marching on countless
occasions for the cause of racial equality.
In the spring of 1971, as official relations between China and the United
States began to improve, Hinton was invited to China as the first among
many Americans who had been persecuted for prematurely advocating the
normalization of US-China relations. During his seven months stay, he
had five meetings with Premier Zhou Enlai and returned to Long Bow village
for several months to investigate the history of the village since his
last visit in 1948. His findings were published in Shenfan (Random House,
1983), a sequel to his classic, Fanshen.
He helped to establish the US-China People’s Friendship Association in
the early 1970s, serving as its founding chairman, and produced the magazine,
New China, in which he published “Zhou Enlai: Conversations with Americans,”
among other articles.
Since the 1970s, Hinton lectured widely in the United States and internationally,
and he made numerous trips to China, returning to Long Bow village repeatedly
as well as visiting other provinces to do research and work on agricultural
projects. He worked in Inner Mongolia for an United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) project from 1980 to 1984, then again
in 1989-1993. He developed a village mechanization project backed by
the FAO in four provinces, and he served as a consultant to UNICEF, Beijing,
in researching and writing a Poverty Alleviation Study on China.
During this period he also worked as consultant and narrator on a number
of documentary films focusing on agricultural and conservation topics,
including Shifting Sands, for the International Broadcasting Trust, London,
and Early Sun, Cold Spring , by the International Communications Associates
for Channel 4 TV, London. He wrote and published many articles, which
were collected in the book, The Great Reversal, The Privatization of China
(Monthly Review Press, 1990).
On April 3, 1999, a one-day conference, “Understanding China’s Revolution:
a Celebration of William Hinton’s Lifework” was held at Columbia University
to celebrate his eightieth birthday. At the conclusion of the conference,
organized by China Study Group and cosponsored by Monthly Review and Columbia’
s East Asian Institute, Hinton gave an impromptu talk on the background
to the writing of Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in A Chinese Village.
Hinton suffered a heart attack during a trip to Taiwan in May 2000. Although
he survived the heart attack, he spent the past four years in a weakened
condition, battling congestive heart failure to which he finally succumbed
on May 15, 2004. Hinton was the husband of Katherine Chiu Hinton of
New York, NY and the late Joanne (Raiford) of Fleetwood, PA, father of
Carmelita (Carma) Hinton of Newton, MA, Alyssa Hinton of Carrboro, NC,
Catherine Hinton of Arlington, MA, and Michael Hinton of Reading, PA,
brother of Joan Hinton of Beijing, China, and the late Jean Rosner of
Concord, MA, grandfather of Adrian Gordon, Devon Mychal, and Aku-nna Hinton,
and uncle to numerous nieces and nephews. Memorial services will be held
at The Putney School, Elm Lea Farm, Putney, VT at 3:00 p.m. on August
21, 2004. For additional information regarding the memorial service contact
Harriet Rogers, Putney School Alumni Office, (802) 387-6273.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent in memory of William Hinton
to: The Putney School, Attn: Doug Gortner, Elm Lea Farm, Putney, VT,
05346, or Monthly Review Foundation, Attn: John Mage, 122 West 27th Street,
New York, NY 10001, or Overseas China Education Foundation, Attn: William
H. Hinton Rural China Education Fund, P.O. Box 7772436, Houston, TX 77215-2436. |
