Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is a 1966 book by William H. Hinton that describes the land-reform campaign during the Chinese Civil War conducted from 1945 to 1948 by the Chinese Communist Party in "Long Bow Village" (the name used in the book for the village of Zhangzhuangcun in Shanxi province). Hinton lived in the village in spring and summer of 1948 and witnessed scenes described in the book and recreates earlier events based on local records and interviews with participants. He explains party strategy to present the campaign's successes in building a revolutionary consciousness and a power-base among the poor peasants, but also its errors and excesses, especially the violence toward rich peasants and landlords. Fanshen has been compared to Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China and characterized as "perhaps the book that most changed American cold war perceptions of the Chinese Revolution." Background Hinton had first gone to China in 1937, then returned after the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1947 to work under the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to spread agricultural technology. When lack of funding closed that program, he taught English at Northern University, a guerilla institution then in Lucheng county, in south Shanxi. Shortly after the New Year festival, in the spring of 1948, faculty and students left the school to join local cadres (party activists) to form work-teams that were sent by higher Party levels on special missions. Hinton joined the team sent to the village he called "Long Bow," some ten miles south of the city. He lived there until August, working in the fields and gathering material for the book that became Fanshen. After leaving Long Bow, Hinton stayed in China until 1953 as a teacher and tractor technician, an experience he described in his 1970 book, Iron Oxen: A Revolution in Chinese Farming. He left China in 1953, when his passport had expired, and returned to the United States by way of the Soviet Union and Europe. When United States customs officials confiscated more than 1,000 pages of manuscript for the book, Hinton sued for their release, but they were then taken by Senate Internal Security Committee headed by Senator James Eastland.