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Long Bow Revisited: Prisms, Prejudices and Insights

William Hinton's new book offers a panoramic view of rural life from the early 1950s to 1971 centred on the village of Long Bow in Shanxi Province, which had also been the subject of his celebrated book on the land revolution of 1946-48, Fanshen. Shenfan (deep digging or ploughing is the second volume of a trilogy of which Fanshen is the first. A third and final volume, Li Chun (beginning of spring), is intended to bring the story of Long Bow forward from 1971. If the final volume is as massive as the first two, the China field will then have an extraordinarily detailed and richly informative 35-year history of the communist transformation of a single village. Given the uniqueness of the planned trilogy, it will most likely become highly influential in shaping perceptions of Chinese rural life. For that reason alone, each of the volumes requires careful scrutiny. Examination of Shenfan, however, raises doubts as to whether it can be taken seriously as an accurate description and analysis of the 1950s and 1960s. Doubts arise because Hinton views Long Bow through the prism of the Cultural Revolution, because he is committed to Maoist values even while he recognizes the negative side of the Maoist era, and because . Hinton was himself a political actor in Long Bow.