Contrary to standard narratives of the Maoist era in which the Chinese Communist Party opposed the introduction of new machines, seeds, and chemicals associated with the global “green revolution,” between 1960 and 1980 the Party promoted a variety of “scientific farming” technologies in rural China, from new high-yield wheat varieties to organic and chemical fertilizers. This point is the subject of Sigrid Schmalzer's excellent new book, Red Revolution, Green Revolution. Moreover, Schmalzer suggests, the insistence that science and technology not be divorced from social revolution made the green revolution in China distinctive and significant.

Schmalzer's approach considers, in turn, the different actors involved in agricultural policy-making, research, and work. She begins with the relevant political history, establishing the significance of the “point-to-plane” approach in policy implementation; the rural scientific experiment movement; “three-in-one” groups that combined state agents, peasants, and scientists; and national models like the Dazhai Brigade and Huarong County. She contrasts the biographies of researchers Pu Zhelong and Yuan Longping to show that the lines between tu and yang (common labels demarcating the local, Chinese, and rustic and the foreign, Western, and elite, respectively) blurred during and after the Maoist era—especially since promoting new agricultural technologies raised questions about the value of peasant knowledge at a time when the Party was trying to champion rural people, but also discredit traditional lore.

Although scientific experiment groups sought to transform rural society, they also met with resistance to the introduction of new methods. Local cadres and technicians became intermediaries between technocratic, top-down and revolutionary, bottom-up approaches to agricultural change. There existed a particular tension between experimentation as drawn from local needs and actors, and demonstration as an authoritarian dissemination of new practices; “experiments” that closely resembled top-down demonstrations for farmers provided a means for state agents to test new technologies with local people and environments.

The final chapters of the book consider what new agricultural technologies meant for educated young people, who struggled with the drive to achieve individual greatness in a world that identified such success as dangerous and potentially bourgeois. For sent-down urban youths and returned rural youths, going to the countryside provided an opportunity to do great deeds, in part by giving rural people more access to urban resources, but the result was often failure.

As part of a new wave of publications examining grassroots experiences of the socialist era, as exemplified by volumes like Maoism at the Grassroots (to which Schmalzer contributed a chapter),Footnote ¹ Red Revolution, Green Revolution is timely indeed. It demonstrates the value of such studies to drawing broader conclusions about the lasting significance of the Maoist period, a question Elizabeth Perry has recently raised.Footnote ² It is also one of several recent monographs to reconsider the revolutionary history of science and medicine, alongside Schmalzer's own first book and works by Miriam Gross, Fa-ti Fan, and Fang Xiaoping. Like Gross, Schmalzer successfully argues here that the Cultural Revolution was a period of (perhaps surprisingly) significant promotion of science and technology.

This book has much to offer historians of science, particularly those who study agriculture, technology, and non-Western contexts. It has clear connections to recent studies rethinking the history of the green revolution by Vandana Shiva, Nick Cullather, and others. The book also engages with literature on global circulations of scientific knowledge; arguing against David Livingstone, Schmalzer makes an intriguing suggestion that socialist Chinese science kept its locality, and its validity, even as it traveled.Footnote ³ Furthermore, she intervenes in historiographical debates over whether the introduction of new technology automatically results in a loss of laborers’ skills, a question originally posed by Harry Braverman.Footnote ⁴ Schmalzer convincingly argues that in the People's Republic, peasants did train to work with many new agricultural technologies, but did not necessarily benefit from them. Given that the book is also making major interventions in standard narratives of the Cultural Revolution, it may be slightly challenging for historians with little exposure to East Asian history to follow the arguments, although Schmalzer does her best to signpost her revisions to these narratives. Regardless, this kind of cross-disciplinary engagement is welcome and generally successful, and will hopefully be productive.

Finally, a major strength of Red Revolution, Green Revolution is Schmalzer's sensitive and sensible approach to sources. She combines archival work with interviews and careful reading of published sources and propaganda. In so doing, she successfully complicates the binary dichotomies of tu versus yang, self-reliant versus transnational, red versus expert, and so on that were an integral part of Party rhetoric. Schmalzer's admirably careful, nuanced analysis suggests a model for thinking about how to parse sources from the Maoist period.