Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China by Sigrid Schmalzer (review)

Red Revolution, Green Revolution examines the multiple contradictions and tensions involved in scientific farming under a socialist state in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Drawing upon state-published propaganda, academic and scientific publications, and oral history interviews across multiple regions in China, Schmalzer has masterfully crafted a narrative at the intersection of science, environment, and socialism. The title belies the clash at hand, between the high modernizing agricultural science of improved seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides that came to a head during the 1960s and 1970s (Green Revolution) and the socialist ideologies of mass mobilization, self-reliance, and class struggle that were fundamental to Mao-era China (Red Revolution). In contrast with instances of the Green Revolution elsewhere in the world that were outwardly purely technical in nature and thus ostensibly apolitical, socialist China was unique in its "insistence that science and technology not be divorced from social and cultural revolution" (119).

For historians of science and technology, at the core of Schmalzer's work is unraveling "how science relates to politics" while simultaneously "challeng[ing] dominant assumptions about what constitutes science" (2). Similarly, Schmalzer is also clearly concerned with issues of environmental studies, particularly "how agriculture should be organized or transformed" and its environmental consequences (2). Though grounded in the PRC context with deep interrogation of Chinese sources, the story is also one of postcolonial subjectivity and modernity, and in that regard it touches upon global literatures of socialism, postcolonial studies, and agrarian and rural development.

Schmalzer begins the first chapter with a number of ideas and concepts emerging from the socialist era that serve as recurring motifs throughout the entire book. Most of these explore a key question posed by science and technology studies, which is how society and politics have defined science and vice versa. The foremost is the tu (土 "native, Chinese, local, rustic, mass, crude") and yang (洋 "foreign, Western, elite, professional, ivory-tower") binary that served as the ideals of agricultural science under the PRC, the former representing a socialist ideal of the "native experts, especially from the laboring classes" and the latter representing experts "associated with institutions or bodies of knowledge somehow markable as 'foreign'" (34, 37).

The tu and yang tension is illustrated most clearly in chapters 2 and 3, which focus on agricultural scientists Pu Zhelong (蒲蛰龙 1912–1997) and Yuan Longping (袁隆平 1930–). Pu can be viewed as the prototypical yang scientist, coming from a relatively elite background and with foreign training in entomology, while Yuan exemplified the tu [End Page E-31] scientist, having achieved his fame through the hard work of locating a rare, wild, non-sterile rice that was used to develop hybridized rice. As Schmalzer is careful to point out, the exceptions to these portrayals reveal much about Maoist science.

The ways Pu and Yuan are remembered and celebrated reveal that state propagandists and popular receptions of both ebbed and flowed with the times and tended to obscure realities. Pu survived the excesses of the Cultural Revolution because of "the lengths he went to synchronize with the radical politics of the day," reflecting his inclusion of mass mobilization of peasants and innovations derived from those mobilizations in his research publications (60). In this regard, Schmalzer is pushing back against literature among scholars that have painted a critical picture of the PRC, and especially the Mao era, as one of repression of science and scientists in favor of ideology. Pu's case demonstrates that socialist ideologies like mass mobilization were not always at odds with scientific goals. Schmalzer's intervention goes both ways, however, as the chapter on Yuan argues that state-produced narratives of Yuan's innovation in hybrid rice were also wrapped up in false anti-imperialist critiques of American plant genetics, clearly for propaganda purposes.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 present some of Schmalzer's most unique contributions by examining historical agents and voices typically missing in histories of science and environment: the peasant, the state...