Obituary: William H. Hinton (1919–2004)
uploaded on: 30 oct 04
by Daniel F. Vukovich
William Hinton, known as “Han Ding” to the people of China whom he loved and served for decades, died on May 15th 2004. His name will always be associated with revolutionary, Maoist China, from the period of war and land reform to the various upheavals of the subsequent decades, and with the people of Long Bow village (near Changzhi) in particular. He visited China as a teenager, but after reading Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China and studying Marxism in a conscientious-objector’s labor camp in New Hampshire in 1943, and especially influenced by his older sister Jean, he joined the army and returned to China in 1945 with the Office of War Information. After witnessing the war and meeting Mao and Zhou Enlai for the first time, Hinton returned home, organized a farmers’ union in 1946, and went back to China in 1947, working through a U. N. project as a tractor instructor and technician. Assigned to a typically corrupt KMT (Nationalist) district, he volunteered to serve in a liberated zone and first experienced the grass roots participation and mass line of the communist movement. In 1948 Hinton joined the land reform team in Long Bow, there to work in the fields, attend meetings, and take the notes that would eventually form the classic Fanshen (“to turn over”), one of the great texts of the 20th Century, now in print for four decades. En route home in 1953 at the height of the Cold War, long after his passport had expired, Hinton faced interrogation by intelligence in Prague and London, where he ate his Chinese exit-visa to keep it from being seized and forged. Once back in the U.S. his passport and the 1,000 pages of notes he had carried on his back for miles in China (while fleeing a KMT bombing raid) were seized. Called before the U.S. Senate’s notorious Eastman Committee (on “national security”), he acquitted himself brilliantly, standing on the 5th Amendment and refusing to testify against himself or anyone else. Blacklisted from all other employment, Hinton farmed a plot of family land in Pennsylvania.
After years of legal battles, Hinton got his notes back and finished Fanshen in 1966. Despite rave reviews of the manuscript, all major publishers refused the book (a fate to which his most recent manuscript – Through A Glass Darkly: American Views of the Chinese Revolution – has returned). It thus fell to Monthly Review Press and Paul Sweezy to publish what quickly became and remains the classic, bottom-up and ethnographic account of the Chinese Revolution and its tortuous but radically democratic and undeniable achievements, as well its profound meaning to the “Old Hundred Names” of China, i.e., to the “ordinary” people.Hinton returned to China and Long Bow in 1971 (after Fanshen had been translated and published in China), where he again worked within and studied the enormous changes in China’s halting, zigzagging but dynamic socialist construction in the countryside. Subsequent works to come out of this and later years in China include Iron Oxen (“a book about tractors and the Chinese Revolution”), Shenfan (or “deep plowing,” the follow-up to Fanshen), Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-89, and also the editing and afterward for Qin Huailu’s Ninth Heaven to Ninth Hell: The History of a Noble Chinese Experiment, a gripping, smuggled-out-of China text on the top-down, strongly resisted and unjust destruction of Dazhai (the famous “model commune”), and of the reputation and career of its proletarian leader, Chen Yonggui.
As befits a Marxist who witnessed and so memorably recorded the Maoist years, Hinton eventually became highly critical of the reform era in China, not just the de-collectivization and commodification of the countryside but also the criminal killings of workers and others in Tiananmen, 1989 by Deng Xiaoping who, as Hinton pointed out, helped turn the anti-rightist campaigns of the 50s into a witch-hunt, not for the tiny fraction of reactionaries Mao believed existed in China, but for 500,000 people. Hinton spent his last years in Mongolia, again teaching the doctrine of no-till farming and sustainable agriculture.
His life was obviously indescribably rich, unforgettable even to those of us who only knew of it through his writings. It calls to mind such legendary, Anglo-American figures as John Reed, Agnes Smedley, Norman Bethune, Anna Louise Strong, or indeed his sister Joan, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, then to abandon that for a life’s work in China and the pursuit of socialism. But Hinton also leaves us with an invaluable, meticulously detailed and analytically powerful body of writing, a corpus that precisely in its detail, in the lives of those whom he observed and worked with, and in his syntheses of all this with the historical, contextual forces at work in Chinese society and the world, is one of if not the single best accounts and images we have of revolutionary and post-49 China, from the grass-roots and village level up to the top level of state and Party leadership and conflict, and back down again. (A favorite technique of his was to begin chapters with doctrinal or large-scale epigraphs and to follow them with the messy, vividly rendered activities at an everyday, ground-level.)
Indeed, what one can miss in his riveting narratives are his theoretical contributions, to Marxist theory and historical materialism (or the dialectic of historical necessity and mass agency), to the ethnography of the everyday, to the complexities of power, desire, social justice and cultural change. As a powerful history of these 50-plus years that shows what the revolution and its people achieved, despite enormous difficulties, set-backs and tragedies, his work will serve future generations inside China and out, and to all who have an interest in what happened in China and what it meant, and who are not buffaloed by the cult of expertise in the stultifying, oft reactionary and orientalist domains of China Studies.
Perhaps, then, Hinton is best remembered as a teacher, a humble but noble role that is also how he and Joan always described Mao himself. Indeed, and notwithstanding the triumphalistic demonization of historical communism and Maoism in particular within China Studies and the world, Hinton has already blazed a path of critical, Marxist inquiry in China studies, as can be seen in the work of historians of China like Maurice Meisner and Jack Gray, and moreover in the recent, powerful work of Robert Weil (Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of “Market Socialism”), Han Dongping (The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and Their Impact on China’s Rural Development) and Mobo Gao (Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China). Han and Gao, as well as Weil, write the type of historically-rooted, thickly described, and Marxian “participant-observer” accounts that Hinton pioneered in China Studies, and they likewise share his fine-tuned analysis of class and of the actually existing, mass-movement-based achievements of the Mao years and collectivization — in education, health, and economic growth within an egalitarian project –and of the lives of the people who lived through these tumultuous years.
Hinton’s texts and methodology will remain important for more specific reasons as well. While fully aware of the partisanship of objectivity, he was always critical of not just the bourgeoisie, the bureaucratic-elite and the Liu-Deng line or “capitalist road,” but also at times of the Maoist leadership and policies. Hence his detailed attention to the too frequent, senseless violence and misguided factionalism that derailed the Cultural Revolution, to Mao’s inability to deal effectively with left excesses in these and previous years, and to the problem of “gigantism” and excessive “winds” that transformed the eminently rational and mass-democratic – and eventually corrected, effective – directives and goals of the Leap years.
His work was anti-romantic but passionate, hard-boiled yet nuanced to the core. So, too Hinton often wrote self-critically, as when he retrospectively notes how his nationally televised talks on labor-productivity were being used to discredit Dazhai and the model of co-operative agriculture he so cogently expounded, or when he critiques his own post-Fanshen work for a certain naiveté in its insufficient emphasis on the class- and two-line struggles, and the socio-historical limits to and pressures upon socialist development that were in fact right there at the very beginning of the land reform and post-49 movements. Thus he came to regret Shenfan’s misreading of the infamous Lushan Plenum, where the Mao-Peng Dehuai conflict was not simply one of personality and policy specifics, but one over the very direction and vision of China’s socialist development, i.e., whether it would pursue its own, unique road or that of bureaucratic capitalism.
For Hinton, precisely because he was so deeply rooted in the world-historic turning over and digging deep of the long Chinese revolution, the context, struggles and aspirations of the people, never abandoned a leftist and “Maoist” perspective (I never knew him to adopt this identity-label himself) on his own work or on China, much to the dismay of most Sinologists and former radicals within China Studies. What explains this consistent refusal, or rather affirmation, is much less some a priori ideological position than Hinton’s deeply historical, profound understanding of what he had actually seen. Thus when he noted that at the start of the “reforms” only 30 percent of village communes were doing well (i.e., about 240 million people), 40 percent stable or showing potential but plagued by problems, and 30 percent stagnating, he refused to see this as grounds for abandoning egalitarianism, collective farming and the three tiered team-brigade-commune system. He instead saw this ratio as an extraordinary achievement, and grounds only for correcting or, where necessary, for adopting the co-operative, “public first, self second” mode of development. And not least because — as his work and that of Han’s and Gao’s has shown — de-collectivization was not in fact a “choice” of the majority themselves, just as many in Long Bow and Dazhai, in Gao village, in Xiyang and Jimo counties, and around Beijing, Tianjin and Shenyang, etc. wanted to retain the co-operative mode, and just as today workers and peasants still revere Mao as their own. This putatively “extreme” assessment in fact flowed out of a profound sense of the intractable and almost unrepresentable difficulties and complexities of achieving an alternative, egalitarian socialist order and modernity, both in general terms and within the context of China above all. Like Mao, Hinton came to see – most fully in the preface to the Chinese edition of Shenfan and in his last essays — that “the capitalist road,” whether in the form of the “Stalinist,” Sovietized form of the Liu-Deng line of the 50s and 60s or the unabashedly “neo-liberal” Deng-Jiang line of the 70s-90s, was simply notto China.
But this unrepentant Marxist take on the P.R.C. also flowed out of another, brilliant observation: that one cannot evaluate or sift out the economic progress of the post-Mao years from what came before it. That as Jean C. Oi, Chris Bramall and others argued later, the successes of the immediate reform years were possible only on the basis of the rural industrialization, the partial but significant de-centralization, the ‘human capital’ and collective surplus of the Mao years. So, too, this means that the remarkable post-79 “take-off,” a.k.a. counter-revolution, could have taken a different, no doubt slower but more socialist, egalitarian and co-operative form, and could have served even more effectively as an alternative model of collective, egalitarian development. There was no voided, ground-zero for the former, but given the fact that the left was tragically, violently defeated, and never institutionalized its gains in anti-bureaucratic, mass-democracy under Mao, there was a “perfect” base to use socialism to build capitalism. Hinton’s work makes clear that China’s development and gains in education, health, and so on did not happen despite but because of the unjustly demonized Maoist projects of land-reform, the Leap and the Cultural Revolution, whose short-term costs did in fact lead to long-term gains. Just as Hinton’s work will, one hopes, save the people of Long Bow, the ordinary people of China, and the Maoist partisans as well as their opponents, from the enormous condescension of history and Sinology, those of us who have learned so much from him and from those in his wake will likewise seek the same for him.
* A slightly modified version of this essay has been published in Social Scientist (New Delhi), v.32, July-August 2004. pp. 93-7.
** My thanks to Joan Hinton for her comments on this piece, and to John Mage’s obit of Hinton at MR..