Table Of ContentWILLIAM HINTON was born in Chicago in 1919. He first visited
China in 1937 and in 1945 served as a propaganda analyst for the United
States Army office of War Information in Kuming, Chongqing, Hankou,
and Shanghai. In 1947 he served as a tractor technician for the United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and began to teach
English at a rural university. Hinton soon found himself engulfed in the
growing land reform movement sweeping through China. He accompa-
nied a Communist Party work team to the village of Changzhuang (Long
Bow) in central Shanxi province, to observe and record this extraordi-
nary process of social reform. When he returned to the United States
in 1953, McCarthyism was running rampant, and Hinton's notes and
diaries were seized by U.S. Customs officers. It would take three years
of legal maneuvering by the United States Senate Internal Security Com-
mittee. After another lawsuit lasting nearly two years and costing over
$6,000, Hinton finally won possession of his papers in 1958, but was
denied a passport and forbidden to leave U.S. soil. In 1968 his passport
was returned, but Hinton was unable to visit China due to the turmoil
of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Beginning in 1971, Hinton returned to
China frequently as an agricultural consultant with local and interna-
tional agencies, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Or-
ganization, where he helped bring mechanization and farm equipment to
selected villages. He has authored numerous books, including Hundred
Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University (1972), Turn-
ing Point in China: An Essay on the Cultural Revolution (1972), Shenfan
(1983), and The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989
(1989). His final book, Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chi-
nese Revolution (2006), was published posthumously. William Hinton
died in 2004.
FANSHEN
A Documentary of Revolution
in a Chinese Village
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FANSHEN
A Documentary
of Revolution
in a Chinese Village
William Hinton
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 1966, 2008 by Monthly Review Press
All Rights Reserved
Cover illustration is taken from the first edition of Fanshen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Available from the publisher
ISBN: 978-1-58367-175-7 (paper)
Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, NY 10001
www.monthlyreview.org
10 98 7 6 5 4 3 21
Fanshen after Forty Years
Fred Magdoff
History does not refer merely ...to the past. On the contrary, the great
force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are un-
consciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present
in all we do.
—James Baldwin
Why publish a new edition of Bill Hinton's Fanshen in 2008? This is
certainly a legitimate question considering the numerous changes and
reversals of priorities that have occurred in China in the four decades
since it was originally published and some sixty years after the events
described in the book. Clearly unanticipated at the time of writing Fan-
shen, China is now well along the "capitalist road" under the leadership
and control of the Communist Party. The short answer to the question of
why republish Fanshen is that it is a remarkable book that has relevance
today not only for China and students of history and social change, but
for much of the third world.
Fanshen is one of the most important books written about the revo-
lution in China. In fact, just the story of how Hinton's book came into
being—originally published by Monthly Review Press in 1966—is quite
an epic tale itself. Bill literally carried his notes on his back as he walked
out of Taihang Mountains in 1948 (attacked by the Kuomintang cavalry
and airplanes on the way) only to have all his materials confiscated by
viii FANSHEN
the U.S. government when he reentered the United States in 1952. Bill
went through a long legal battle to gain their release, was called to ap-
pear before the Senate Internal Security Committee, finally obtained the
release of his notes in 1958, and then spent years writing and searching
for a publisher. It was subsequently published in numerous languages
and read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world interested
in events in revolutionary China and what it might have to say about
their own countries.
Land reform, designed to dismantle feudal power and exploitation,
was central to the Communist wartime agenda. It became policy mainly
because it was the only way to quickly help the poorest rural dwellers
(and almost all of China's population was rural at the time). But it was
carried out initially in wartime—the period described in Fanshen—par-
tially because of its power to demonstrate to the peasants that they had
something to fight for and would therefore have a direct stake in helping
the Eighth Route Army defeat the Japanese as well as the Kuomintang.
(This is not dissimilar to the motivation behind Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation during the U.S. Civil War, aimed partially to galvanize
slaves to flee Southern plantations and fight for the North.)
The termfanshen literally means to turn over. Hinton uses the term
as it was used at the time to describe a literal turnover of resources as
well as a transformation of power. It refers to the throwing off of the
yoke of the landlords and the transferring of land—as well as housing,
farm implements, carts, work animals, clothing—from the more wealthy
villagers to the landless and poor peasants.
Hinton's masterpiece deals with the momentous changes that oc-
curred during the land reform "turn over" in Long Bow village—with
a population of about 1,000 that had less than 1,000 acres of arable
land—in North Central China's Shanxi Province following the takeover
by the Communist army, but before the country was completely liber-
ated. Fanshen is essentially a documentary of life and transformation
in Long Bow from 1946 through much of 1948. The reader becomes
familiar with key participants, their physical appearances, backgrounds,
foibles, and struggles. Hinton is outstanding in his perception of people
and events and is able to portray a vivid picture of events in all their com-
plexities. The reader also learns not only the larger issues and struggles
and some of the history leading to the land reform but also gets to know
the real human beings involved in the struggles—in all their humanness.
INTRODUCTION ix
Bill portrays their actions as encompassing the full range of human be-
havior, from the most altruistic to the most selfish.
Villages in the areas of northern China under control of revolution-
ary forces had undergone a first attempt at land reform in 1946-1947.
This was an often chaotic and sometimes brutal affair—as old scores
were settled frequently with violence, mistakes were made, and ad-
vantages were taken by many of those in authority. The Commu-
nist Party decided to study a sample of eleven villages in the county
in which Hinton was working to see how well the policies had been
accomplished, correct mistakes made during the process, and assist
in developing policy for the remaining villages in the region. Hinton
received permission to join the work party that was assigned to Long
Bow, a village not far from the university where he was teaching.
The work team assigned to the task of reviewing the situation and help-
ing the village correct its course was led to believe that Long Bow was
an especially troubled village that had made many mistakes in carrying
out the Draft Agrarian Law. (It was a complex village, with a sizable
population of Catholics. But, then again, most villages had complexi-
ties of one type or another.) One of the issues high on the work-team
agenda was whether too many middle peasants had been attacked and
had their property taken from them. The line of the Party was that only
the very rich peasants and landlords and institutions—such as the Catho-
lic Church—should have property confiscated and turned over to poor
peasants and laborers. Middle and rich peasant property and the non-land
property of the wealthy (stores, factories, etc.) were not supposed to be
confiscated. The Party was attempting to keep the economy functioning
and did not want to alienate a large portion of the populace; for example,
approximately a third of Long Bow village before liberation consisted of
middle peasant families.
One of the tasks of the work team—with active village participa-
tion—was to go through a classification of peasants into a number of
categories. This process was complicated by the tensions that developed
among the people. The poor, wanting more "fruits" for distribution,
tended to want families classified higher than they objectively belonged.
In contrast, the more well off wanted to be classified lower down so they
would lose less (or no) property.
Although the process of fanshen was not meant to create complete
equality, it did create near equality in the countryside, with the promise
