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,...
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