Eisenman Joshua. Red China’s green revolution: technological innovation, institutional change, and economic development under the commune

Columbia University Press, 2018. — 505 p. — ISBN: 978-0-231-54675-1This book offers a startling new analysis of China’s most important local institution in Mao’s time, the people’s commune. In particular, it explores the least-well-reported years of recent Chinese history, the 1970s, when the country’s so-called economic rise began. Most officials, journalists, and scholars still treat that institution and decade as simply radical and backward looking. Most of the 1970s is described misleadingly in many books as part of a basically homogeneous Cultural Revolution, before China began to prosper.
The commune as an institution was indeed a failure after 1958, bringing famine and poverty to millions; so most writers presume it remained an economic and political failure until it was abolished during the few years after Deng Xiaoping became China’s supremo in 1978.
To the contrary, Joshua Eisenman shows that after 1970 China’s communes, production brigades, and production teams became crucial generators of rural prosperity. He uses new sources,
presenting statistics to prove that rural productivity grew quickly — nationwide—in the 1970s. This achievement occurred not just in a few selected and traditionally rich regions, such as Jiangnan and Guangdong, where a few previous writers had noticed. Instead, this productivity was widespread in many parts of the country. Eisenman presents data from eight major provinces, and from China as a whole, demonstrating that rural production from the early 1970s rose rapidly per commune member, per land unit, and in total. These findings refute the conventional, quasi-official story, which holds that before 1978 China’s rural (as distinct from urban) economy was in dire straits, requiring neoliberal efficiencies to fix it.