In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term "green revolution" to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world – and forestall the spread of more "red", or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In "Red Revolution, Green Revolution", Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and "educated youth". The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere – and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today's sustainability and food justice movements. This history of "scientific farming" in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.
About the Author
Sigrid Schmalzer is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of "The People's Peking Man", also published by the University of Chicago Press, and co-editor of "Visualizing Modern China".
Reviews
"Upending familiar assumptions about the origins and consequences of the global Green Revolution, Schmalzer breaks important new ground in our understanding of modern Chinese history and the role of science in industrial agriculture. Rather than relying on misleading distinctions between modern and traditional, laboratory and field, politics and science, or even between the capitalist West and socialist East, Schmalzer convincingly draws our attention to the diversity of approaches taken in the effort to revolutionize Chinese agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a sophisticated political history from the ground up" – Shane Hamilton, University of Georgia
"Writing with both elegance and precision, Schmalzer unveils the continuing imbrication of science and politics, not simply in the obviously hyperpolitical Maoist period, but also in the supposedly technologically driven Dengist era. She produces a nuanced, sophisticated description of agricultural scientific practices in the People's Republic of China, one that challenges our assumptions about both Maoist agriculture and the Maoist period in general. 'Red Revolution, Green Revolution' is a must-read for historians of modern China and historians of socialism, as well as historians of science and agriculture" – Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona
"Agricultural science is inherently political. We may distrust the claim of technocrats and agribusiness that they conduct neutral research for the benefit of all, yet few of us would go so far as to advocate a full politicization of research, putting politics in command of laboratories and experimental fields. This, however, is what Maoist China did – and as Schmalzer demonstrates in her meticulously researched and beautifully written book, Maoist agricultural science worked, producing a socialist Green Revolution that was as impressive as the US-led Green Revolutions in India, Mexico, or the Philippines. Without romanticizing Maoist mass science, Schmalzer not only corrects the oft-repeated myth that Maoists were 'anti-science'; she shows that a different, more democratic and inclusive science was and remains possible" – Jacob Eyferth, University of Chicago
