[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Long Bow v. Chen Village
Monthly Review Press first published Fanshen in 1966. It is an account of how land reform was implemented in one village-Long Bow-in northern China. Hinton first visited China in 1937. He returned in 1947 with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and stayed on in the liberated areas of north China as a tractor technician and teacher until 1953.
During that time, mainly living in Long Bow, he was witness to the great social convulsion that was the Chinese Revolution.
Along with his Chinese academic colleagues, Hinton advised the residents of Long Bow on the complicated tasks of teaching peasants to read, breaking up old feudal estates, insuring the equality of women, and replacing the old magistrates who governed the village with elected councils.
While there, Hinton took more than one thousand pages of notes about what he saw. In them he detailed not merely measurable successes and failures of the revolution, but the deep scars of struggle, the resistance to change, and the uniquely Chinese process, often painful and violent, of criticism and self-criticism. Hinton was witness to a world literally 'turned upside down'.
On his return to the United States, Hinton was determined to document the revolutionary process he saw in that peasant village, but on his return, at the height of the McCarthyite anticommunist repression, customs officials seized his papers. Only after a lengthy court battle was he able to retrieve them in 1958. Hinton spent the next six years completing his manuscript and nearly three more seeking a publisher. All of the major New York publishers turned it down despite enthusiastic reader's reports and scholarly recommendations.
In most cases the rejections seemed to be politically motivated and were of a piece with the great fear that the victory of the Chinese Revolution....
