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 (1919–2004) 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 (or in June, according to another source), 1966, Joan Hinton, Erwin Engst 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 Tomkins (Tāngpǔjīnsēn 汤普金森)—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