HINTON, William H(oward) 1919-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born February 2, 1919, in Chicago, IL; died of congestive heart failure, May 15, 2004, in Concord, MA. Educator, farmer, and author. A former sympathizer with the cause of the 1949 Chinese revolution, Hinton is best remembered for his optimistic books about peasant life in Communist China, though he later became disillusioned with Communism. His first trip to Asia came before he attended college when he traveled in China, supporting himself with odd jobs and returning home via the Soviet Union. He entered Harvard University in 1937, transferring to Cornell University two years later, where he earned a B.S. in agronomy and dairy husbandry in 1941. During World War II, Hinton returned to China, working as a propaganda analyst. After returning to Connecticut to work for the National Farmers Union, he again traveled to China in 1947 as a tractor technician for the United Nations' relief efforts there. From 1947 until 1953, he remained in China and worked for the government of Shansi Province and then for the government in Peking. It was during this time that China was undergoing a complete restructuring of its economy, as lands once privately held were taken over by the government and distributed among peasant farmers. Taking extensive notes on what he witnessed there, Hinton recorded this dramatic change in people's lives with a sympathetic and, some would later accuse, overly romantic eye. When he returned to the United States, America was in the midst of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunts, and Hinton's notes were seen as traitorous. The notes were confiscated, his passport revoked, and he found himself blacklisted. Hinton subsequently supported himself as a truck mechanic in Philadelphia for the next seven years, and from 1963 to 1979 he earned an income by farming land owned by his mother in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania. The legal battle for his notes eventually ended in Hinton's favor, and he was able to write and publish Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1967). This was followed by several more books on China, including Iron Oxen: A Documentary of Revolution in Chinese Farming (1970) and Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (1983). By the late 1980s Hinton was no longer optimistic about Communist China, a change of view spurred by the student massacre by government troops at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and reflected in his 1990 book, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China (1990). In addition to his writing, Hinton continued work as an agriculture consultant for China, Mongolia, the United Nations, and Mexico from the 1970s through the early 1990s; he also continued to work as a farmer in Pennsylvania. Though his viewpoints about China changed since his writing of Fanshen, the book is still considered an important documentation of Chinese peasant life in the early 1950s and has been translated into ten languages. In 1975, it was adapted as a play by David Hare.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, May 24, 2004, section 1, p. 11.

Guardian (London, England), May 24, 2004, p. 19.

Independent (London, England), May 24, 2004, p. 33.

New York Times, May 22, 2004, p. B15.

Times (London, England), May 26, 2004, p. 29.