CONVERTS STAY LOYAL TO CHINESE SOCIALISM : `FOREIGN EXPERTS' DISILLUSIONED BY NATION'S CHANGE.

Byline: Seth Faison The New York Times

There was a time, nearly 50 years ago, when revolutionary fervor in China attracted left-leaning Americans, with its mantras of self-reliance and manual labor, and its promise of achieving a socialist dream.

Joan Hinton, for one, gave up a promising career as a nuclear physicist in 1948 to come and work on a farm, enduring severe hardship in the name of a political ideal. Most Chinese who labored beside her believed in the same dreams, although they abandoned them when other options - fresh vegetables, telephones and television - eventually came along.

Hinton, however, is still here, working at a dairy on the outskirts of Beijing. She toils on, a practicing believer in proletarian values, even though almost everything she has worked for in China has been washed away by an onslaught of change, much of it economic.

``I always say you need three things to survive in China,'' said Hinton, relaxing in jeans and army-issue green sneakers. ``A sense of humor, a sense of history and a sense of struggle. If we didn't know how to struggle, we'd still be up in the trees.''

Hinton is one of a handful of veteran leftists from the United States and Europe who remained in China through years of political turmoil, and are disillusioned by the transformation that has both brought the nation's economy to life and allowed an array of social ills to flourish.

Once oddities only because they stood out physically, these ``foreign experts,'' as the Chinese government still classifies them, even though some have become Chinese citizens, attract attention for the way they cling to political beliefs that most Chinese abandoned years ago.

Sidney Shapiro, 80, a lawyer from Brooklyn who came to China in 1947, and Ruth Weiss, 87, an Austrian who moved here in 1951, say they still believe that socialism will somehow prevail, even though, in China, it seems further out of reach each day.

Among the dozen or so long-staying ``foreign experts,'' however, none are as hard-core in their devotion to Maoist ideals as Hinton, 74, and her husband, Sid Engst, 76. And yet their admiration for the militant leftism that erupted in the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early '70s, and their disdain for the changes that followed, do not seem to have dampened their enthusiasm for living here.

With her husband, and with the three children who came along the way, Hinton lived in rural Shaanxi Province for 18 years - first turning old scrap metal into cooking utensils, then raising cattle and then ducks - before moving to the Beijing area, living on a commune and, after it was disbanded, settling in at the dairy. The grown children no longer live in China.

Hinton speaks nostalgically of ``the 30 years'' - 1949 to 1979 - a period that many Chinese see as essentially wrong-headed in its efforts to mold human nature to be something it is not.

``It was like that journalist who went to Russia and said `I've seen the future and it works,' '' said Hinton, referring to Lincoln Steffens' trip in the 1920s.

``That's how I see the 30 years. It worked. There was very little stealing, there was great community spirit, there was a common goal. That's all been thrown away now, except for the memory.''

Hinton, whose mother founded the Putney School in Vermont, began her professional career in the 1940s as a nuclear physicist at Los Alamos to help produce the first atomic bomb in 1945. She became disillusioned as the Cold War began, and quit physics.

After coming to China in 1948 to join Engst in an area ``liberated'' by Communist soldiers, she was accused by McCarthy-era Americans of being a spy who spilled nuclear secrets to China.

Hinton giggles girlishly as she shows a visitor a laminated copy of a magazine article about her, ``The Spy Who Got Away,'' with a drawing that depicts her as a Lauren Bacall look-alike in a trenchcoat, scribbling in a notebook as she observes a nuclear test in the desert.

``I never looked that good,'' said Hinton, her blond hair now silver. Nor, she said, did she ever use her physics expertise in China.

If they cling to political views that sound antiquated in today's China, Hinton and Engst are acute critics of problems in Chinese society.

``It's a mess,'' Engst said. ``Nobody listens to the central government anymore. They keep putting out laws, and nobody listens. You can pass all the laws you want, it makes no difference.''

Shapiro, a translator whose Brooklyn accent is still healthy after 49 years in China, similarly mourns the rise of crime and corruption, and the loss of the communal spirit he once knew in Beijing. Yet he blames something deeper than current policy.

``The great flaw of Chinese society has been recognized: It is not Socialism or Communism, but Confucianism,'' said Shapiro, who became a Chinese citizen in 1963. ``That means blind worship of authority, which has been used very much to the advantage and to the disadvantage of the Communist Party over the years.''

Weiss, a retired translator, seems perplexed by what she sees out her window at the Friendship Hotel, where she lives alone in an apartment cluttered with Chinese knickknacks.

``In the 1950s, there was a real feeling of cohesion among people,'' she said. ``Now, everything you have to pay, no one takes responsibility for anything. For me, Mao Tse-tung was always a father figure. I thought he was really interested in the welfare of the people. Obviously, he wasn't.''

Hinton, however, is still a believer in Mao.

``Mao started the Cultural Revolution to cure the disparity between the few and the many,'' Hinton said. ``How could that be wrong?''

She dismisses the current view, that Mao's misguided policies led to the deaths of more than 30 million people in the famine of 1960-62, as revisionist history.

``We were in the countryside then, and there was malnutrition, not starvation,'' Hinton said. ``Without socialism, we would have starved. We banded together, sharing grain coupons.''

Engst chimed in: ``The Cultural Revolution achieved a lot. It identified the main problem, which is the dark side of the party. It just didn't succeed in eradicating it.''

The ``dark side'' of the party means those led by Deng Xiaoping, who championed the transformation of the past 17 years.

In fact, Engst had a condition for being interviewed: ``You have to promise not to describe us as pro-Deng Xiaoping or pro-reform.''