Agricultural Science and the Socialist State

Introduction

The dominant historical narrative of science in Mao-era China charts a pendulum-like alternation between "radical" periods (the Great Leap Forward and most of the Cultural Revolution) when political struggle stifled intellectual pursuits and economic development, making science virtually impossible, and "moderate" (or technocratic) periods when steadier minds — especially those of Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping — prevailed and more liberal policies rekindled the hopes of beleaguered scientists. David Zweig depicts Maoist "radical policies" on agriculture to have been "fueled by an anti-modernization mentality that saw economic development as the antithesis of revolution." In fact, however, the history of agricultural science in socialist China is marked by a great deal of continuity across radical and moderate periods, and modernization based on scientific development was a value embraced by leaders across the political spectrum. Indeed, the move to develop "scientific farming" began circa 1961 during the heyday of the moderate technocrats, but it built on important precedents set during the Great Leap Forward, came into its own amid the intensifying radical politics of 1965, flourished throughout the Cultural Revolution, and remains relevant even today. The green revolution thus progressed along much the same timeline in China as elsewhere, and it did so in the very middle of China's continually unfolding red revolution.

The Cold War presented at least three competing development paradigms, including the one embraced by Mao and his followers. The attractiveness to Third World nations of the Marxist-Leninist model of state-led economic development alarmed many academics and political leaders in the United States, inspiring Walt Rostow's tremendously influential "non-communist manifesto," The Stages of Economic Growth (1959). The parallels between Leninism and Rostow's "modernization theory" are clear. Both were committed to modernization through technological development, and both depended on deterministic expectations that development would proceed through specific "stages." Soviet agricultural policy embraced the goal of progress through modernization and even adopted the US strategy of Taylorism to increase efficiency in farming practices. Though Mao considered himself a Leninist and never questioned the progressive value of modernization, his economic and political program — and the philosophy of science that went with it — departed in dramatic ways from modernization as pursued in the Soviet Union. Frustrated with the bureaucratic and technocratic structures of authority that formed in China during the period of Soviet learning, and with the rigid expectation of "stages" that slowed China's progress toward communism, Mao sought to abandon the determinism of staged growth and instead embrace a voluntari