Through a Glass Darkly: American Perspectives on the Chinese Revolution - Historical Analysis for Scholars & History Enthusiasts
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Product Description
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.
Customer Reviews
Hinton offers a much needed correction to decades of brainwashing about the supposed uselessness of trying to build a society that is not geared toward individualism and greed. The book is difficult for a typical lay person, as it relies on many pages of technical details about agriculture that are specific to an agrarian society that was grappling with very complex land re- distribution process.All of the class antagonisms of the old feudal order were still in place, with landlords, rich peasants, and poor peasants. The cultural backwardness with women in virtually a slave status, the fatalistic views and Confucianistic hierarchical bonds which held people back, and the forces who did not want socialism, but only to develop a capitalist economy "free" from colonial domination, were all huge obstacles that were needed to be grappled with in a way that would unite people in the interest of economic, social, and political progress. In the course of this, Hinton makes clear that there were always two "lines" in the CCP-Mao's view of taking the Socialist road, and the view of the "Capitalist Roaders" who had a very different line, which, after Mao's death took China down the path to where it is today; a capitalist country with a phony "communist party." which has all the scourges of modern day capitalist society. Hinton directs his polemic at three critics of the Chinese Revolution; Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden, who had tried to, in their writings, blame the CPC for difficulties China had in economic development, as well as cast aspersions on the Maoist led struggle in the cultural sphere against confucianism and the patriarchal family structure. These were some of the most interesting parts of the book, as Hinton was able to get away from boring narratives involving tables that illustrated land and grain yields. Hinton himself had spent many years in China, and had been an eye witness to the kinds of struggles that characterized the Cultural Revolution, especially at the village level. His classic Fanshen, A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is the best book to read on the subject. Nevertheless, Hinton, in Through a GlassDarkly, brings out to the reader, a view of what it was like for the Chinese people to confront the staggering challenges presented by their leap from thousands of years of primitive economic and social feudalism into a vastly different modernized mode of production based on cooperation, and with its goal the liberation of humanity.
