More than forty years after its initial publication, William Hinton's Fanshen continues to be the essential volume for those fascinated with China's revolutionary process of rural reform and social change. A pioneering work, Fanshan is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complimentary and caustic relationship in the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation, as witnessed by a participant. Fanshen continues to offer profound insight into the lives of peasants and China's complex social processes. Rediscover this classic volume, which includes a new preface by Fred Magdoff.

In vividly dramatic form, this play tells how a remote Chinese village comes to terms with Communism. Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese revolution created a whole new vocabulary in which a very important word is "fanshen" which literally means "to turn the body" or "to turn over." To hundreds of millions of landless and poor peasants it means to stand up, throw off the landlords' yoke, and gain land, stock, and houses. Moreover it means to enter a new world and this play is the story of how the peasants of Long Bow build a new world.2 women, 7 men

The Great Reversal is the first critical study of the widely heralded reforms currently transforming China's economy. From his long experience in Chinese agriculture, Hinton first examines the course of agricultural reform over the past decade, then looks at its consequences in different areas of the countryside and considers its implications for the country as a whole. He raises troubling questions about China's capitalist future-the growing landlessness, increasing inequality, and above all, the destruction of the nation's natural resources and the collectively built infrastructure that was the great achievement of the revolution. In so doing he sheds new light on the sources of discontent behind the demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. Recognized inside and outside China as an expert on the country's agriculture, Hinton spent five or six months there every year but one since 1978, when the wave of reform was first introduced. He witnessed the events of June 1989 first hand. This experience gives authority to an analysis that digs deeper and more widely than anything else available. His essays open up a new perspective on Mao and his successors, one that has been totally obscured by the Western media.