Sigrid Schmalzer - Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China

Beyond these concerns lies a more general and less well-recognized problem produced by, and implicit in the very concept of, the green revolution. It is the problem of how to understand the relationship between science and technology on one hand and sociopolitical transformation on the other. Does science offer an alternative to political solutions for the worlds problems, as the US architects of green revolution intended? Or is science inseparable from its political context, as Marxists have long argued and scholars in the field of science and technology studies continue to maintain?

The history of the green revolution as it unfolded in socialist-era China represents a critical piece of the puzzle we must assemble to address these and other pressing questions about our common future. New agricultural technologies have been of central importance in the transformation of Chinas Moreover, it facilitates a needed critique of the fundamental assumptions about science and society that undergirded the green revolution, and that continue to undergird the dominant political ideology of the world today.

The goal of this book is to bring into view Chinas unique intersection of red and green revolutions. Socialist Chinese agricultural science will not serve as a model: it is always important to exercise caution when looking to history for models, and socialist China offers perhaps even more than the usually large set of complications found in any real society. But neither will it be merely a cautionary example: the Mao era was not the simple picture of totalitarian oppression and ecological disaster that is presented in many accounts available in English. Rather, in this book socialist Chinese agricultural science will be called upon to challenge dominant assumptions about what constitutes science, how science relates to politics, who counts as a scientific authority, and how agriculture should be organized or transformed. In the process of stretching our minds to grasp the different answers to these questions offered by socialist Chinese history, along with the limits and consequences of those answers, we will be better able to think critically and inspirationally about the prospects for agriculture and science in our own times and places.

In 1968 the director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), William Gaud, coined the term green revolution. He said:

Record yields, harvests of unprecedented size and crops now in the ground demonstrate that throughout much of the developing worldand particularly in Asiawe are on the verge of an agricultural revolution.... It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.

The significance was not lost on observers in China, where Mao Zedong had brought a red revolution to victory in 1949, and where, still under his leadership, an even more tumultuous transformation had begun under the banner of Cultural Revolution (19661976). In 1969, Peoples Daily bemoaned the pursuit of green revolution in India, defining it as the so-called agricultural revolution that the reactionary Indian government is using to hoodwink the people. The article made clear just why the green revolution represented a reactionary choice: the Indian Minister of Food and Agriculture had reportedly cried out in alarm that if the green revolution... does not succeed, a red revolution will follow.

Does this mean that socialist China opposed the new technologies of the green revolution or agricultural modernization more generally? No. Contrary to common perception, even the most radical leaders in socialist China embraced the causes of science and modernization, and so in some important ways, the green revolution in red China looked strikingly similar to the green revolution as Gaud imagined it. The goal there as elsewhere was to transform the material conditions of agriculture through mechanization, the introduction of new seeds, and the application of modern chemicals in order to increase production and raise standards of living. The organization of these efforts in China was shaped in part by Soviet experience: Soviet advice influenced much of socialist Chinas 1950s work in science and economic development.