The people's commune is arguably the most maligned and misunderstood institution of socialist China, and Joshua Eisenman's book Red China's Green Revolution makes a very important contribution to the much-needed reassessment of this political, economic, and military organization. He argues that the commune was not an economic failure, as maintained by official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) historiography since the 1980s and mainstream Western academic and popular opinions alike. Rather, it was an effective means of advancing agricultural development, and even rural industrialization, raising total food production and the standards of living of rural workers. Consequently, he also argues that the commune was not abandoned due to the bottom-up initiative of peasants who pursued a more economically productive arrangement in the household responsibility system, again as maintained by both CCP official historiography and mainstream Western literatures. Instead, decollectivization was a political decision imposed top-down by the reformist faction around Deng Xiaoping, who did so to consolidate their power in the aftermath of Mao's death. Therefore, Eisenman's book is important for being much more than a study of rural China and agricultural development, as it contributes to an increasingly well-formulated critique of China's engagement with global capitalism.

The book's arguments are very convincing, and although it is sometimes repetitive, it is well organized and written very clearly, featuring a foreword and prologue that provide succinct accounts of the existing literature, debates, and Eisenman's contribution. The book is well researched, drawing on careful readings of government documents, newspapers and other materials from the period, extensive secondary literature, and a wealth of statistical data on production of grains, pigs, and edible oil at national and provincial levels, as well as the expansion of irrigation and the production and use of electricity, tractors, fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yield seed varieties. There is also much data on population size and commune labor; technical and teacher training; student enrollment; arable land; and, in a province-level case study, the number of communes and their average number of brigades and production-team subunits. Moreover, the book features appendices with eleven pages of additional statistical data and eighty pages of previously untranslated key government documents. Thus, it serves as a valuable English-language resource on agricultural development in China during the 1960s and 1970s. One aspect that could have been stronger, however, is Eisenman's defense of the reliability of this data. He addresses this explicitly in the introduction (pp. 20–21), and although his defense is robust, it focuses only on data about agricultural output, from which his main arguments follow. Yet more could have been done to dispel skepticism about the quality of statistical data on socialist China more generally.

After the introduction, chapter 2 provides a historical account of the origins and early transformations of the commune from the 1950s through the 1960s. It distinguishes different forms of cooperativism and collectivism during the period and indicates the political struggles that led to each transformation, including how the catastrophic results of collectivization during the Great Leap Forward were quickly reversed as household plots, cottage industries, and rural markets were allowed to coexist with reformed communes thereafter.

Chapter 3 provides a detailed account of the last and most productive phase of the commune, which Eisenman calls the “Green Revolution Commune.” It contains the empirical heart of his narrative, demonstrating how agricultural investments and technological innovations during the 1970s, which resulted from collectivization, drove rising agricultural productivity and outputs. A downside of this chapter (and so of Eisenman's book as a whole) is its relatively simple account of, and uncritical approach to, what constituted the “green revolution” in China. Thus, Eisenman's book title is somewhat misleading, and those interested in a more nuanced discussion of the “green revolution” in China should turn instead to Sigrid Schmalzer's recent book on the topic, as both books complement each other particularly well for a reassessment of Maoist agricultural and rural development.Footnote ¹

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 form the analytical core of the book, where Eisenman examines the main economic, political, and organizational sources of agricultural productivity in the communes. In short, the communes extracted capital and savings from their members through the workpoint system, in which individuals were remunerated with points corresponding to their labor for the commune, and those points were only converted into payment in grain or cash at the end of the harvest season, after all costs, taxes, and community funds were extracted for reinvestment into collective infrastructure and technology. Chapter 4 explains this with theoretical concepts from classical and neoclassical economics (as “super-optimal investment” with high savings rates). Chapter 5 explains how this system of collective remuneration was sustained despite high rates of extraction, relying on a mixture of Maoist ideology, authentic dedication to the collective, and social pressure from the people's militia. Interestingly, Eisenman challenges Chinese exceptionalism, identifying Maoism with religious revivals and showing how similar religiosity was also integral to other communal experiments in Europe, the United States, and beyond. Both chapters explain how these economic and political arrangements effectively curtailed “free riding,” “brain drain,” and other collective action problems. Finally, chapter 6 attempts to measure econometrically the effects of the commune's organization size and structure on its economic productivity, drawing on county-level data from Henan Province. Although three of Eisenman's four hypotheses in this chapter do not yield statistically significant results, he does demonstrate that the relative size of communes and their subunits did have some effect on agricultural productivity, as small communes with small teams allowed for more worker supervision and greater productivity, while larger communes with larger teams made up for this shortfall in close supervision with greater economies of scale in the allocation of productive factors.

The seventh and final chapter before the conclusion examines newspaper articles from the 1970s, memoirs and other accounts of the leading politicians during the era, and a rich body of secondary literature to reconstruct a narrative about the political struggles among top CCP leaders and their factions during the 1970s and early 1980s. Eisenman demonstrates how decollectivization resulted from the victory of Deng Xiaoping and his “reformist” faction, who abolished the communes to consolidate their power against factions of “radicals” associated with the Cultural Revolution and “loyalists” surrounding Mao Zedong's appointed successor, Hua Guofeng. The chapter successfully shows how decollectivization favored the “reformists,” and also how they actively cultivated the false propagandistic narrative of a “bottom-up” push for decollectivization because of the economic “inefficiencies” of the communes.

While making an important contribution to the study of the commune from the 1950s through the early 1980s, the book abstains from drawing implications for contemporary agricultural and rural development (again, see Schmalzer for a good counterpoint). Now that the inefficiencies of individual household production, low rates of investment in the countryside, and dramatic rural exodus are threatening national food security and social stability, the CCP has grown concerned and initiated various reforms to address these problems, which Eisenman demonstrates were previously addressed successfully through collectivization. Yet the government's reduction of taxation on peasants and increased funds and social programs for “poverty alleviation” and “rural vitalization” are being promoted alongside a dramatic surge of capitalist social relations in the countryside, including wage labor and the effective privatization of farmland through the transfer of land use rights from poor peasants to wealthier farmers, urban investors, and agribusiness corporations. Eisenman could, and perhaps should, contribute more explicitly to a timely critique of ongoing capitalist transformations in China's countryside.