Hinton lived in the village in spring and summer of 1948 and witnessed scenes described in the book and recreates earlier events based on local records and interviews with participants.
Fanshen has been compared to Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China and characterized as "perhaps the book that most changed American cold war perceptions of the Chinese Revolution.
When lack of funding closed that program, he taught English at Northern University, a guerilla institution then in Lucheng county, in south Shanxi.
[3] After leaving Long Bow, Hinton stayed in China until 1953 as a teacher and tractor technician, an experience he described in his 1970 book, Iron Oxen: A Revolution in Chinese Farming.
He accompanied a work-team that was sent to inspect and control local implementation of the Outline Land Law, which the North China Bureau of the Party had promulgated on October 10, 1947, the anniversary of the 1911 Revolution.
Unless they actively worked with the Nationalist government, which village elites seldom had reason to do, Party leaders did not want to alienate rich peasants and landlords, whose support was essential to the war effort.
But on July 7, the Northeast Bureau, the Party office in charge of the campaign against Chiang's forces in Manchuria, ordered a radical strategy of targeting all landlords and rich peasants, and sent work teams to manage the process.
As background he explains the extreme poverty of the area, which he stated made the landlord system especially cruel, and the wartime occupation by the Japanese army, which divided the village into those who collaborated and those who did not.
The village therefore did not experience the period of united resistance and moderate reform that characterized Mao's policies of New Democracy in the Base Areas of North China during the war.
[15] To "China's hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants it meant to stand up, to throw off the landlord yoke, to gain land, stock, implements and houses."
Because of the success of the book, Hinton was welcomed back to China in the 1970s, when he visited Long Bow five times and wrote Shenfan (1983), a sequel to Fanshen that followed the village from the 1950s through the Cultural Revolution.
[17] Within a few years of its publication, Fanshen became regarded as a classic and described characterized by a noted China expert in Harvard Magazine as one of fifteen essential books on the country.
[18] Benjamin I. Schwartz, a Harvard University specialist on Mao and his role in the revolution, wrote in the New York Times that Hinton's book is "extremely valuable but also highly problematic, as are all other sources on the history of the period."
Schwartz continued, "As one who does not share in the slightest the author's faith that Mao has discovered the cure for human selfishness or for the exploitation of man by man, and as one who finds much of the high doctrine of the book simplistic, untrue, and often enormously trying, I would nevertheless insist that Mr. Hinton has made valuable and in some ways unique contributions to our understanding of life in a northern Chinese village on the eve of Communist takeover..."[19] The Columbia University anthropologist Morton H. Fried noted "one of the major problems the book poses, that is its reliability.