Joan Hinton (Chinese name: 寒春, Pinyin: Hán Chūn; 20 October 1921 – 8 June 2010) [1] was a nuclear physicist and one of the few women scientists who worked for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.

She and her husband Erwin (Sid) Engst participated in China's efforts at developing a socialist economy, working extensively in agriculture, and supported the policies of Mao Zedong.

Ethel Lilian Voynich, a great-aunt, was the author of The Gadfly, a novel later read by millions of Soviet and Chinese readers.

[5]Joan Hinton was shocked when the US government, three weeks later, dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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.

In October 1952 Joan went public in Beijing, attending the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference where she denounced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

[9] On August 29 (or in June, according to another source), 1966, Joan, Erwin and two other Americans living in China—Bertha Sneck (Shǐ Kè 史克, who had previously been married to Joan's brother William) and Ann Tompkins (Tāngpǔjīnsēn 汤普金森)—signed a big-character poster put up at the Foreign Experts Bureau in Beijing with the following text:[citation needed] Which monsters and freaks are pulling the strings so foreigners get this kind of treatment?

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.

"[10] In 1972, Joan and Erwin started working in agriculture again at the Red Star Commune in Daxing, Beijing.

"[11] 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.

"[12] Her son, Yang Heping (Fred Engst) moved back to Beijing in 2007 as a professor at the University of International Business and Economics.