Nowadays, if anyone claims that he is "fighting to liberate the human race", he will be dismissed as an eccentric old fogy.

This sentiment, once the catchphrase of Chinese Communists, is not even to be found in the official vocabulary of today.

Yet, it was the ideal an American woman pursued almost throughout her life.

Joan Hinton, a nuclear physicist who once worked for the Manhattan Project that led to the birth of the atom bomb in the 1940s, died on June 8 in the capital at the ripe old age of 89.

Last Friday, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Mechanization Sciences held a memorial in honor of Hinton, during the course of which many Chinese leaders sent messages to mourn her passing.

Hinton came to China in 1948 and, since then, devoted herself to the development of the nation's dairy industry as well as its farm machinery sector along with husband Erwin Engst, a dairy-farming expert.

Both remained staunch supporters of the Chinese Communist revolution.

When Engst died in 2003, Hinton insisted that the phrase - "has fought for the liberation of the human race" - be included in the official obituary prepared by the Ministry of Machinery Industry, Engst's former employer.

Her hidebound attitude may have seemed odd today, but her ideals, as well as the contributions she and her husband made towards China's development, has inspired many.

Some commentators praised her as a worthy contrast to some Chinese officials who have lagged in their duty to serve the public.

I do not want to compare Hinton to these Chinese officials, as I don't think they merit any comparison to her.

What deserves more attention, I think, is Hinton's and her husband's strength of character.

As a scientist involved in the nascent nuclear technology industry of the 1940s, Hinton gave up the opportunity to garner greater fame. Instead, she chose to come to the then backward China at the age of 27, devoting the rest of her life to the lackluster vocation of raising cows and renovating farm machines.

As veteran participants of the Chinese revolution, Hinton and Engst acquired a certain status in the hierarchy of officialdom during the 1980s. Even so, they refused to move to a more comfortable apartment that the government built for them, and continued living in a shabby farmhouse located in a Beijing suburb.

When their son was sent to the countryside like other youth to be "re-educated" during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), the American couple declined an offer from the leaders of their work units to get the boy back to Beijing. "We didn't send him there for a comfortable life," they said.

Even after China launched market-oriented reforms in the late 1970s, Hinton and Engst remained faithful to their dream of a Communist society. They criticized officials for "working for whoever has money rather than for penniless peasants" and questioned whether they still remembered "the Communism of the Yan'an era".

It is not of concern whether the couple was right or wrong in their beliefs. It is the persistence that they demonstrated to follow through on their ideals that deserves our kudos, precisely because it is clearly what we Chinese lack most nowadays.

We once had strong beliefs, but decades after the economic reform those beliefs have become diminished or even fallen into oblivion. The pursuit of wealth has permeated all levels of society.

Officials trade their power for money or sex; law enforcers betray principles for bribes; doctors prescribe unnecessarily large amounts of medicine for kickbacks from drug manufacturers; merchants sell fake or even toxic products without the slightest sense of guilt; professors publish theses that are completely plagiarized; students happily buy and use hi-tech cheating gadgets in exams. In fact, corruption has become all-pervasive.

To argue that this is only a small part of society is meaningless. Sure, these kind of people account for only a small percentage of our social fabric.

Yet, this tiny percentage is large enough to cause disaster, and this moral decay is the result of a lack of strong conviction, such as those shown by Hinton and Engst.

When one has no belief system, one becomes unscrupulous. Most Westerners believe in God. They are taught from childhood that God is watching all their actions.

That is one reason why they are more law-abiding and have more morals than we do and also why they usually stick to principles once they recognize them. It also partly explains why Hinton and Engst followed their ideals to the very end.

One may disagree with the couple's political beliefs, but we must surely emulate their tenacity in pursuing those ideals.

E-mail: liushinan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/23/2010 page8)