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.
...MoreReview Shen Yubin (2022) Review of "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China". East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine.
Review He Bian (2022) Review of "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China". Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 265-275).
Review Lynda S. Bell (2017) Review of "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China". American Historical Review (pp. 818-819).
Review Eva Sternfeld (March 2018) Review of "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China". East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 91-95).
Review Kirsten Moore-Sheeley; Christine Y. L. Luk (2018) Review of "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China". Journal of the History of Biology (pp. 179-182).
Review John Dearing (2017) Review of "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 497-498).
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