Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China
hen William S. Gaud of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) first used the term "green revolution" in 1968, he drew a clear division between its purely technological approach to rural reform and the state socialist "red" path of political revolution. However, as Red Revolution, Green Revolution demonstrates, the geopolitical subtext and ostensibly apolitical approach of the Green Revolution has obscured the significant achievements of socialist China that in important ways paralleled what Gaud and others have described for the "developing world." Contrary to popular perceptions, technocrats and radicals in Maoist China embraced the core values of science and modernization, adopting the Green Revolution technologies of high yielding varieties (HYVs) chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization. At the same time, socialist China was unique in its blending of "red" and "green" revolutions. The denunciation of the term "green revolution" in socialist China (the more common term being "scientific farming" Ke Xue Chong Tian didn't derive from an antiscience platform, but from the belief that the Green Revolution of science and technology couldn't be divorced from the Red Revolution of political and social reform.