The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898–1937 by Randall E. Stross

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 167 well-intentioned programs in the last forty years has shown. In his concluding paragraph, Headrick speculates about “alternative pasts” (or, as economic historians say, counterfactual histories) of Europe’s colonies on the assumption that they had not been conquered. They might “have preserved their traditional ways for a few generations more, like China, Afghanistan, or Arabia; or they might have become modern and industrial, like Japan” (p. 384). Or they might have stag­ nated, economically and technologically, like most of Latin America, Thailand, and Ethiopia, with which Headrick might have compared them. India’s history since 1947 provides a clue. Rondo Cameron Dr. Cameron, Wm. Rand Kenan University Professor at Emory University, is vice president of the International Economic History Association. His book,/! Concise History of the Worldfrom Paleolithic Times to the Present, is published by Oxford University Press. The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898—1937. By Randall E. Stross. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal­ ifornia Press, 1986. Pp. xi + 272; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00. The Stubborn Earth is well organized, thoroughly researched, insight­ ful, and superbly written. The book is sufficiently comprehensive to provide the uninitiated reader a valuable perspective, and there is enough detail on individual characters and the China of their times to command the interest of specialists. The technical focus on agri­ cultural development in a poor agrarian country is an unusually au­ thoritative one, yet theory and historical perspective are interwoven fluidly and cogently into the narrative. American actions and reactions are vividly portrayed through the central characters’ own writings, and skillfully contrasted with the Chinese context. Although the book’s coverage is not exhaustive, it includes most of the more prominent and successful foreign participants, who came with the financial sup­ port of the U.S. government, religious groups, the Rockefeller Foun­ dation, or private individuals. By focusing on narrow technological solutions to China’s agricultural problems and ignoring deficiencies related to the country’s social organization, administrative potency, and underlying political and rural economic conditions, their efforts, Randall Stross argues, were doomed to failure. During the early 20th century, debate focused on whether Chinese agriculture was hopelessly backward or curiously advanced, with many of Stress’s characters implying the former and a few of the others, as well as the prominent authority F. H. King, arguing the latter. Stross appropriately compartmentalizes this subject: many Chinese farmers were and are rather sophisticated in soil fertility maintenance and the complexities of intercropping and rotation regimes but have been deficient or deprived in many other respects compared with their 168 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE developed country counterparts, most notably in access to equipment and various types of institutional support. One might add that the diversity in abilities and practice across China must not be underestimated. In the epilogue, Stross points out that the zeal with which the Na­ tionalist government and the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction embraced land reform on Taiwan was directly related to the perception that China had been “lost” to the Communist party via the rural legitimacy it had secured by advocating and ad­ ministering land reform on the mainland in areas under its control. But he goes on to chide the Rockefeller Foundation, Cornell, and other American universities for not learning from past mistakes in pursuing a narrow technical fix focused on seed technology, not only in the course of promoting the Asian “green revolution” via postwar establishment of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and inter-university cooperative programs, but even including most SinoAmerican collaboration since the late 1970s. Here the argument sounds too glib. The IRRI and the Rockefeller Foundation, like the earlier American agriculturalists, have focused on seed technology and other technical aspects of agricultural science and farm economics research because they correctly perceived them to be logical points of foreign participation—where a small number of committed individuals under limited funding could make a con­ tribution based on their comparative advantage, without being un­ ceremoniously booted out of the country by the government in power. Time and again China’s early visitors recommended courses of action and development of institutions outside...