Through a Glass Darkly: American Views of the Chinese Revolution

by William Hinton

Through a Glass Darkly was William Hinton’s last book. It draws on a lifetime of immersion in Chinese politics and society, beginning with the seven years he spent in China, working mainly in agriculture and land reform, until 1953. On his return to the United States in that year, Hinton first encountered the distortions and misrepresentations of the Chinese Revolution that he examines in this book.
Hinton defends the achievements of the Chinese Revolution during the three decades from 1948 to 1979 from its detractors both in the United States and, since 1979, in China itself. His starting point is the work of John K. Fairbank, for many years a professor at Harvard and the “dean of China Studies” in the United States. But it is not limited to critique. Instead, Hinton’s critique of Fairbank leads into a wide-ranging examination of the nature of the transformation attempted in China, its social and political bases, and the causes and consequences of its policies in land reform, agriculture, combating famine, popular culture, industrialization, morality, and much else besides.
Moving from large questions to concrete details, often drawn from his own experiences, Hinton brings everyday life in revolutionary China graphically to life. In a time when the distorted views first developed by U.S. critics of the Chinese Revolution are often propagated by the new Chinese elite themselves, Through a Glass Darkly has more than just historical relevance. For anyone wishing to understand present-day rivalries between the United States and China, Hinton shows how these began. This is a fitting completion of the work of a great scholar and revolutionary.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

Reviews

[Nathaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely wonderful and necessary read for anyone that wants to read about the real Revolutionary China. That is to say, every needs to read this book. Once again lies and slander carried out against the achievements of socialism and communism are brushed away by facts. William Hinton not only observed land (and other) reform in China's revolutionary period, but he lived and worked in it. The book is primarily a complete refutation of the book "Chinese Village, Socialist State", an anti-communist propaganda piece that weaves the fictional narrative about Communist (pre-"Democratic-Revolutionary") China that persists to this day, but it is also a spirited defense of socialism and communism as not only dynamic theory but achievable and necessary.

自由、平等、博愛!

[Jayden gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

we;re all comrade s now.

[Marlon Masia · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far I have read three of Hinton’s books: “Fanshen”, “The Great Reversal”, and now this one “Through a Glass Darkly”. Even though i’m still missing a few of his works, of which i only plan to read one (Shenfan), I think this might be his best. To be fair though it does depend on what you’re looking for. This book, being Hinton’s last, has the benefit of having Hinton’s most insightful and clearheaded analysis of the mao era and part of the deng reforms. However, this is not to say his other works are in anyway lesser quality than this one.

[Jeff McLeod · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hinton wades into the morass of hysterical Western academic condemnations of the achievements of China's socialist period that became trendy in the 90s and 2000s. Always fun to read him, love the inclusion in the text of personal narratives and anecdotes from a life of living and working with farmers in rural China. Notably in this text he still denies the severity of the famine following the Great Leap Forward that seems to have become consensus by now even on the anticapitalist left.

[Xiao]

Thank you comrade Hinton