There was no ripple in the Western media in October over the birth centenary of Joan Hinton, the extraordinary nuclear scientist-turned socialist farmer, who chose to tread a different path after she saw the devastation caused by the first atom bomb explosions in Japan.
Hinton would have turned 100 on October 20, a date all but forgotten in Chicago, where she was born. However, China remembered this staunch friend who had dedicated herself to the cause of a socialist society in the People’s Republic of China and there were media tributes remembering her life and work, as well as a commemorative event held in Beijing on October 19 by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. They remembered Han Chun, the Chinese name Hinton adopted in China, and her over five decades of dedicated service.
A forum commemorating the birth centenary of Joan Hinton (Han Chun), organized by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, is held in Beijing on October 19. Photo by Ren Xin
The dairy farm north of Beijing, where Hinton lived before her death in 2010, and her work in agriculture and farming in China was as different from her career before she came to China as was the persona of Han Chun from Hinton.
In the 1940s, Hinton, an ace skier who could have been an Olympian athlete, was working for the Manhattan Project, an initiative to develop the first nuclear weapons. Subsequently, in August 1945, the United States dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make Japan surrender in World War II, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, mostly unarmed civilians, including children, and devastation shocked Hinton, making her become an anti-war peace activist.
She left the Manhattan Project in protest and after the war ended, following in the footsteps of her brother William, who had worked in China for several years and later wrote a book on the country’s land reform under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), went to Shanghai in 1948. Soon she moved to Yan’an, the revolutionary base of the CPC, where she met fellow American and agrarian technician Erwin Engst, who had come to China two years before her arrival to help with agricultural development.
They married and eventually moved to Beijing with their children. Apart from a few lecture trips to the U.S., Hinton spent the rest of her life in China, designing and improving agriculture machinery and dairy equipment to serve the development of China’s socialist economy. The couple designed and operated China’s first mechanical farm, developed an automatic milk pasteurizer, and improved livestock breeding as well as training local farmers.
Her life in China could hardly have been more different from the nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos. In the early years, she worked with livestock, even spinning wool. Then in 1952, she attended a peace conference in Beijing to express her “guilt and shame” for her role in the development of the atom bomb and condemned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a gesture that put her back on the radar of the United States and made her be seen as a defector. She was suspected of sharing nuclear secrets with the Chinese government and demonized by American magazines as “the atom spy who got away,” an accusation at which she could laugh in genuine amusement during interviews with the American media in her later years.
Hinton never regretted her move to China, saying she could not be more satisfied, having taken part in the Chinese revolution, one of the greatest events of the era in her eyes.
In the first half of the 20th century, many foreigners came to China to take part in the socialist movement, like Israel Epstein, the Polish-born journalist and author, who shared with the outside world the work of the Chinese revolution leading to the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and Henry Norman Bethune, a Canadian surgeon and communist party member, came to China supporting the CPC-led army during Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, treating the war-wounded till his death in 1939.
There were still others like Briton George Aylwin Hogg, who participated in the guerrilla raids against the Japanese, and Rewi Alley, a New Zealand-born writer and political activist who worked to establish cooperatives and technical training schools in China.
They all believed in internationalism, which today has been integrated into the Chinese culture. Internationalism, or proletarian internationalism, was summed up by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, where they urged the oppressed worldwide to unite and join in the fight worldwide against the oppressors. The manifesto ends with the famous line: Workers of the world, unite!”
At the memorial in Beijing, Zhao Yuezhi, a professor at Tsinghua University, summed up why the memory of Hinton’s work and philosophy is so important today. “Now, globalized neoliberalism has spawned an era of nationalism and isolationism,” she said, according to a report by Global Times. “More worrying, the threat of a new cold war against China is destabilizing a world that needs international cooperation even more because of global issues, such as COVID-19 and ecological crisis. Because of this, we are more aware of the significance and values of the internationalism spirit represented by Hinton.”
What Han Chun and others like her believed in is still upheld by millions of Chinese today. In remembering her, one remembers the spiritual heritage they have passed on, which is the inspiration behind China’s initiative to form a community with a shared future for all.
