In her deftly written and closely argued new monograph, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China, Sigrid Schmalzer creates an entirely new vision of the meaning and significance of “scientific farming” in China during the Mao era. Focusing primarily on the period just prior to the Cultural Revolution, in the early 1960s, through to its conclusion in 1976, but also on various retellings of events related to agricultural science and its proponents since the onset of the Reform Era in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Schmalzer gives us a dazzling overview of the development and promotion of scientific farming by very different participants in the processes. There are chapters devoted to the experiences of two highly trained scientist superstars, to ordinary peasants and educated youth who participated in agricultural extension and scientific experiment groups, and to local cadres and agricultural technicians who were responsible for managing the ebbs and flows in agricultural policy through the Mao era and beyond. But this is not just a story of the techniques of scientific agriculture (such as developing integrated methods to control agricultural pests, discovering and applying new methods of fertilizing crops, and developing new strains of hybrid rice), which in other national and transnational contexts is known as “the green revolution”; it is also a complex tale of how social and political actors of many stripes devoted themselves simultaneously to the goals of China’s “red revolution”—that is, to bringing scientific agriculture to “the peasant masses” to achieve ever higher gains in agricultural production and to launch China on a path to rapid economic growth. In telling this story, Schmalzer challenges the prevailing view that the politics of Mao-era China eschewed “rational science” in favor of peasant-based mass activism to achieve its goals. Instead, she demonstrates how the green and red revolutions in China were inextricably intertwined, with the ultimate goal of bringing together tu (native, Chinese, local, rustic, mass, crude) and yang (foreign, Western, elite, professional, ivory-tower) science to create a more democratic, mass-based approach (34–38).