Joan Hinton


Joan Hinton was a nuclear physicist and one of the few women scientists who worked for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. She lived in the People's Republic of China after 1949, where she and her husband Erwin Engst participated in China's efforts at developing a socialist economy, working extensively in agriculture. She lived on a dairy farm north of Beijing before her death on June 8, 2010.

Early life

On 20 October 1921, Hinton was born as Joan Chase Hinton in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Sebastian Hinton, was a lawyer ; her mother, Carmelita Hinton, was an educator and the founder of The Putney School, an independent progressive school in Vermont.

Family background

Her sister, Jean Hinton Rosner, was a civil rights and peace activist. Joan Hinton's great-grandfather was the mathematician George Boole; Ethel Lilian Voynich, a great-aunt, was the author of The Gadfly, a novel later read by millions of Soviet and Chinese readers.

Education

Hinton graduated from the Putney School, where her skiing skills qualified her for a berth on the 1940 U.S. Ski Team at the Winter Olympic Games, had they been held that year. She studied physics at Bennington College and graduated with a bachelor's degree in natural science from Bennington College. In 1944, Hinton earned a doctorate in Physics from University of Wisconsin.

Career

Nuclear scientist

She observed the Trinity test at Alamogordo and wrote about it:
It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions. The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up. We were still talking in whispers when the cloud reached the level where it was struck by the rising sunlight so it cleared out the natural clouds. We saw a cloud that was dark and red at the bottom and daylight at the top. Then suddenly the sound reached us. It was very sharp and rumbled and all the mountains were rumbling with it. We suddenly started talking out loud and felt exposed to the whole world.

Joan Hinton was shocked when the US government, three weeks later, dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She left the Manhattan Project and lobbied the government in Washington to internationalize nuclear power.

Moving to China

Her brother William H. Hinton had travelled to China for the first time in 1937 and returned after the war. His book Fanshen: Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, published in 1966 after many years of obstacles, described his observations of land reform in the communist-occupied area of Northwest China.
In March 1948, Joan Hinton travelled to Shanghai, worked for Soong Ching-ling, the widow of President Sun Yat-sen, and tried to establish contacts with the Chinese communists. She witnessed the communists gaining control of Beijing in 1949 and moved to Yan'an, where she married Erwin Engst, who had been working in China since 1946. After 5 months living in caves in 1949 they moved to Inner Mongolia to work on a state farm, living meagerly in a stockaded village named Chunchuan without electricity or radios. At one point the village was attacked by bandits. No one knew in the USA of their whereabouts except family and a circle of scientists. In October 1952 Joan went public in Beijing, attending the Asian and Pacific Peace Conference where she denounced the atomic bombing of Hiroshoma. This launched a paranoid response in the USA that she was willing to assist China developing nuclear weapons. Questions were asked about her of her brother William during the Army–McCarthy hearings. In May 1955 the couple and their three young children moved to a farm near Xi'an during the period of the Great Leap Forward. In April 1966 the family moved to Beijing to work as translators and editors at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
After 1956, Hinton finally obtained permanent residency to live in China and she chose to retain her US citizenship.
On August 29, 1966, Joan Hinton, Erwin Engst and two other Americans living in China—Bertha Sneck and Ann Tomkins —signed a big-character poster put up at the Foreign Experts Bureau in Beijing with the following text:
Which monsters and freaks are pulling the strings so foreigners get this kind of treatment? Foreigners working in China, no matter what class background they have, no matter what their attitude is toward the revolution, they all get the "five nots and two haves": the five nots—first: no physical labour, second: no thought reform, third: no chances of contacts with workers and peasants, fourth: no participation in class struggle, fifth: no participation in production struggle; the two haves—first: they have an exceptionally high living standard, second: they have all kinds of specialization. What kind of concept is that? This is Khrushchevism, this is revisionist thinking, this is class exploitation! We demand: Seventh: the same living standard and the same level of Chinese staff; eighth: no specialization any more. Long live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!

A copy of the poster was shown to Mao Zedong, who issued a directive that "revolutionary foreign experts and their children should be treated the same as the Chinese."
In 1972, Joan Hinton and Erwin Engst started working in agriculture again at the Beijing Red Star Commune.
In June 1987, William Hinton went to the town of Dazhai in Shanxi province to observe the changes brought about by the reform policies, and in August 1987, Joan Hinton stayed at Dazhai as well.
In a 1996 interview with CNN, after nearly 50 years in China, she stated " never intended to stay in China so long, but were too caught up to leave." Hinton described the changes she and her husband had witnessed in China since the beginning of the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. They stated they "have watched their socialist dream fall apart" as much of China embraced capitalism. A 2004 MSNBC interviews noted her critical assessment of economic change as "betrayals of the socialist cause." She noted what she describes as a rise of exploitation in Chinese society.
Hinton lived alone following the death of her husband in 2003. Her three children moved to the United States, with Hinton noting that "They probably would have stayed if China were still socialist." Hinton retained her American citizenship, which she considered "convenient for travel." Her son, Yang Heping moved back to Beijing in 2007 as a professor at the University of International Business and Economics.
In her 2005 essay "The Second Superpower", Hinton stated, "There are two opposing superpowers in the world today: the U.S. on one side, and world public opinion on the other. The first thrives on war. The second demands peace and social justice."
She remained active in the small community of expats in Beijing, protesting against the war in Iraq.

Personal

In 1949, Hinton married Erwin Engst, a dairy-cattle expert, in Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, China. Hinton had two sons, Bill and Fred Engst and a daughter, Karen Engst.
In 1923 Hinton's father checked himself into a clinic for treatment, but while there he committed suicide.
On June 8, 2010, Hinton died in Beijing, China. She was 88.

in English