Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China - Rilegato

Schmalzer, Sigrid

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 022633015X ISBN 13: 9780226330150

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 2016

Riassunto

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.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Sigrid Schmalzer is 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 coeditor of Visualizing Modern China.

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Red Revolution, Green Revolution

Scientific Farming in Socialist China

By Sigrid Schmalzer

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-33015-0

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
INTRODUCTION, 
1 Agricultural Science and the Socialist State, 
2 Pu Zhelong: Making Socialist Science Work, 
3 Yuan Longping: "Intellectual Peasant", 
4 Chinese Peasants: "Experience" and "Backwardness", 
5 Seeing Like a State Agent, 
6 The Lei Feng Paradox, 
7 Opportunity and Failure, 
EPILOGUE, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Sources, 
Index, 
Plates, 

CHAPTER 1

Agricultural Science and the Socialist State

Introduction

The dominant historical narrative of science in Mao-era China charts a pendulum-like alternation between "radical" periods (the Great Leap Forward and most of the Cultural Revolution) when political struggle stifled intellectual pursuits and economic development, making science virtually impossible, and "moderate" (or technocratic) periods when steadier minds — especially those of Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping — prevailed and more liberal policies rekindled the hopes of beleaguered scientists. David Zweig depicts Maoist "radical policies" on agriculture to have been "fueled by an anti-modernization mentality that saw economic development as the antithesis of revolution." In fact, however, the history of agricultural science in socialist China is marked by a great deal of continuity across radical and moderate periods, and modernization based on scientific development was a value embraced by leaders across the political spectrum. Indeed, the move to develop "scientific farming" began circa 1961 during the heyday of the moderate technocrats, but it built on important precedents set during the Great Leap Forward, came into its own amid the intensifying radical politics of 1965, flourished throughout the Cultural Revolution, and remains relevant even today. The green revolution thus progressed along much the same timeline in China as elsewhere, and it did so in the very middle of China's continually unfolding red revolution.

The Cold War presented at least three competing development paradigms, including the one embraced by Mao and his followers. The attractiveness to Third World nations of the Marxist-Leninist model of state-led economic development alarmed many academics and political leaders in the United States, inspiring Walt Rostow's tremendously influential "non-communist manifesto," The Stages of Economic Growth (1959). The parallels between Leninism and Rostow's "modernization theory" are clear. Both were committed to modernization through technological development, and both depended on deterministic expectations that development would proceed through specific "stages." Soviet agricultural policy embraced the goal of progress through modernization and even adopted the US strategy of Taylorism to increase efficiency in farming practices. Though Mao considered himself a Leninist and never questioned the progressive value of modernization, his economic and political program — and the philosophy of science that went with it — departed in dramatic ways from modernization as pursued in the Soviet Union. Frustrated with the bureaucratic and technocratic structures of authority that formed in China during the period of Soviet learning, and with the rigid expectation of "stages" that slowed China's progress toward communism, Mao sought to abandon the determinism of staged growth and instead embrace a voluntari

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 022633015X
• ISBN 13: 9780226330150
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 304
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile