Return To The United States
On his return to the United States after the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953, Hinton wanted to chronicle his observations of the revolutionary process in Long Bow. But on his return, at the height of McCarthyism, customs officials seized his papers, and turned them over to the Senate Committee on Internal Security (chaired by Senator James Eastland). Hinton was subjected to continual harassment by the FBI, his passport was confiscated, and he was barred from all teaching jobs. At first permitted to work as a truck mechanic, he was later blacklisted and denied all employment. He then took up farming on some land inherited from his mother, and farmed for a living for some fifteen years. During this period Hinton continued to speak out about the successes of the Chinese Revolution and waged a long (and eventually successful) legal battle to recover his notes and papers from the Eastland Committee.
After the government returned his notes and papers, Hinton set to writing Fanshen, a documentary account of the land reform in Long Bow village in which he had been both observer and participant. After many mainstream U.S. publishers had turned it down, it was published in 1966 by Monthly Review Press and was a stunning success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, with translations in ten languages. In the book, Hinton examines the revolutionary experience of the Long Bow village, painting a complex picture of conflict, contradiction and cooperation in rural China.
After the death of Edgar Snow, Hinton became the most famous American sympathetic to the People's Republic of China, and he served as the first national chairman of the US China Peoples Friendship Association from 1974-1976. The Association published his controversial interviews with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Hinton cooled toward official policy as market reforms under Deng Xiaoping moved away from the type of socialism originally associated with Mao Zedong. Eventually he wrote Shenfan (read as the opposite of Fanshen) and The Great Reversal, and became an outspoken opponent of the Socialism with Chinese characteristics and Chinese economic reform that the current CPC continues today.
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“I hate that word. It’s return—a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.”
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“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
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“... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“A tree may grow a thousand feet tall, but its leaves will return to its roots.”
—Chinese proverb.
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I make this direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)