Red China's Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune

by Joshua Eisenman

China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth.Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction

474 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 24, 2018

Reviews

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a very interesting and useful book, despite its shortcomings. It's essentially a bourgeois attempt to grapple with the reality of the commune's productivity and the social changes that led to decollectivization

I do think applying bourgeois methodologies to explain class struggle in China has a tendency to miss some important nuances in these power struggles

For example, the Solow-Swan neoclassical growth model doesn't adequately take into account regional variations. So trying to explain GLF difficulties using this model fails to account for the vast differences in policy and execution from region to region (even if officially all under the same policy)

Additionally when applying a neoclassical growth models to the PRC you ending up conflating consumption as a result of wages vs out of revenue due to surplus value. That might not matter too much for the purpose of graphing growth over time, but it does fails to account for some of the particularities of the capitalist roaders. It shouldn't be reduced to consumption vs accumulation

I don't think Eisenman does a thorough job of justifying splitting the GPCR period into two separate communes (Left and Green). The claim is made in chapter 4 that the Green Commune period saw accumulated capital put towards productive investments, but he doesn't explain what made the Left Commune investments unproductive. There definitely is a change after the 1970 North Agricultural Conference, but I would argue this is a different stage within the same period. The overall direction of the class struggle in the countryside hadn't changed, just the official policies

The conflation of the PRC communes with other "socialist" communes (a la Owen's New Harmony Commune) is a bit of an oversimplification. Disagreements with the utopian socialists is an important part of Marxism's beginning. At a high level, you can find similarities, but there are some very fundamental differences that aren't touched on at all

Further we have the introduction of a "high modernist" type of Commune that has no real world examples outside of the PRC or Soviet People's Democracies (so why not define it as socialist?), and the only theoretical example given is from antiquity (so why "modernist"?). It seems like inventing categories so the author can emphasize the features of the examples that the author finds important without having to take the example's own definitions of themselves into account

The treatment of Maoism as a religion is a bit of a reach as well. It completely ignores the ways in which various factions within the CPC used the cult of personality for their own benefit. Mao did allow it to develop (a mistake) in order to help push back against the Liu-Deng clique, but he didn't like it. It's a manifestation of backwards, hold over beliefs from Confucianism. So practically speaking, it did play out as quasi-religuous beliefs, but this wasn't an official part of Maoism and was at odds with its philosophy and politics

The focus on policies, rather than political lines, rears its head again when trying to make sense of the power struggles after Mao's death. Since Hua Gofeng supported the communes, he's labeled a loyalist, despite laying a lot of the ground work for Deng to take over. We're unable to parse the difference between supporting the communes as a stepping stone towards communism (the left line) and supporting the communes as a step towards large scale capitalist agriculture, all the while calling it socialist (Hua's line), because we're limited to just looking at high level policies

I do think Eisenman does a great job of showing the lie of the mythical origin of decollectivization, and he is able to unearth a lot of the backhanded and secretive steps that Deng and his supporters took to get to decollectivization

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an excellent example of a mixed-methods political science approach done right. Eisenman persuasively dismantles the Deng Xiaoping constructed myth of the "unscientific" and "irrational" collective approach of agricultural production. The 1970s Green Revolutionary Commune may have been completely tyrannical, but it was not pursued without reason — even if it was to advance unconscionable statist goals. Amazing scholarship!