Histories of the green revolution naturally cross national borders, as the ‘green revolution’ signifies the distribution of a kit of agricultural technologies and practices developed largely by American scientists outside the United States, in part as a means of opposing communist influence in non-aligned nations such as India. These histories, however, typically recount a liberal, American vision of development: the government of the United States, non-governmental institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and elite universities partnered after the Second World War to help poorer nations modernize their technical sectors. In the case of the green revolution, this meant the breeding of high-yielding hybrid cereals and the increased use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. In this narrative, scientist–heroes saved peasant–victims, and science was universal, apolitical (or, in a technocratic framework, foundational, but therefore immune, to politics), and produced by elites.

Historian Sigrid Schmalzer's Red Revolution, Green Revolution offers a challenging new dimension to the above précis by examining the changes in agriculture that took place in China from the end of Mao's Great Leap Forward, through the Cultural Revolution and into the technocratic, post-socialist period that followed Mao's death. Schmalzer draws upon both state propaganda and interviews with the peasant farmers and plant scientists who effected China's green revolution to show that, sans explicit collaboration with the United States and with restricted support from the Soviet Union, the Maoist and post-Maoist Chinese state fostered a ‘scientific farming’ of its own, including a system of regional experimental agricultural stations and, through these, the development of high-yielding hybrid sorghum and rice.

Schmalzer's account focuses on ideology in agricultural science, exemplified by the perceived differences and complementary values of tu (Chinese/peasant) science and yang (Western/elite) science. In her account, Maoist agriculture was neither blinded by Marxism and ‘anti-scientific’ nor self-consciously ‘sustainable’, but was instead a pragmatic mix of policies designed to test different seeds and growing techniques and make the most successful assays available throughout the nation. (Some of these techniques were later studied as models of sustainable agriculture by non-Chinese scientists.) Altogether, Maoist agriculture constituted a coherent scientific approach to farming that paralleled the Western green revolution – a mix of tu and yang practices of knowledge making about seeds, pesticides, fertilizers and other natural and technical objects. State policies exhorted both traditional agrarian values – propaganda posters depicted ‘old’ peasants happily teaching urban-trained agronomists about local varietals – and modernist technical experiments similar to those of the land-grant colleges in the United States. Tu and yang were not stable categories, as enthusiasm for traditional knowledge and paranoia about state enemies and reactionary agents waxed during the Cultural Revolution and waned after Mao's death. But even without a clean rupture at the level of policy, the tension between Mao-era and post-socialist accounts of modernization in agriculture betrays a shift in state attitudes towards scientists as heroes and peasants as authorized knowledge makers.

To structure such a chronologically, regionally and technologically inclusive history, Schmalzer offers an introduction to the major contradictions within socialist and post-socialist Chinese farm policy followed by two case studies that explore these tensions in detail. Her first case concerns Pu Zhelong, an entomologist who received his PhD at the University of Minnesota in 1949 and returned to China, becoming a leading researcher on biological pest control methods. Unlike many Western-trained, yang scientists, Pu did not suffer physically during the Cultural Revolution, but, as a non-peasant agronomist, his status grew precarious. In order to maintain his credibility, Pu worked to meld yang and tu by collaborating in the early 1970s with peasants on the Big Sand (Dasha) commune in Guangdong. Pu's work at Big Sand with insects and ducks became an international model for biological pest management and, more generally, sustainable farming.

Schmalzer's second case study concerns Yuan Longping, an ‘intellectual peasant’ – a peasant educated in Western science – remembered as the father of hybrid rice. Despite the fact that Yuan worked with a large number of other researchers in order to develop hybrid rice, he is a singular celebrity today, better known in China than Norman Bourlag, the ‘father of the green revolution’, is in the United States. Schmalzer traces the increasingly Yuan-centric stories of hybrid rice's development from the end of the Mao years through the brief rule of Hua Guofeng and into the post-socialist era. At each step, Yuan was elevated higher in status due to his tu origins as a peasant. Since rice has long been tightly tied to Chinese national identity, the ‘face’ of hybrid rice had to incarnate tu, not only yang, science.

Subsequent chapters draw from state archives and interviews with former state agents, ‘rural youth’ who were trained as agricultural researchers and subsequently had significant roles in directing scientific farming in China, ‘failed’ youth who did not elevate their status through agricultural research, and current officials on model communes. Schmalzer proves an adroit ethnographer, reflecting sceptically but without cynicism on her exchanges with her interlocutors, especially the contemporary state officials. Each chapter adds a facet to a solid account of scientific farming in China: ‘scientific farming’ emerges as a category of agricultural modernization clearly co-constructed by scientific elites, rural agricultural workers and state cadres. In Schmalzer's interlocking accounts, science is not apolitical and universal, but, at the same time, neither are her actors anti-scientific. Instead, ‘science’ appears in practice as a major prong of Maoist ideology as well as a culturally bound category linked to centuries of Chinese knowledge making about the natural world, food production not excepted.

Overall, Red Revolution, Green Revolution is an exemplary and welcome contribution to Chinese cultural history, the history of agriculture and STS. By demonstrating from party propaganda, scientific publications and interviews the numerous ways in which political conceptions of tu-and-yang science contoured the green revolution in China, Schmalzer offers a model for interdisciplinary and methodologically sophisticated STS studies of food production and consumption.