The price of purity: High-yield cotton, technocratic state-building, and the 1952 ‘cotton uprooting incident’ in rural China

Abstract

In the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China sought to fuel economic recovery by rapidly disseminating high-yield Stoneville cotton. To preserve genetic purity, Shandong authorities mandated the strict eradication of mixed planting. In 1952, this top-down standardisation was stymied by the unsuitable agrarian conditions of Cangshan County and the rational risk-aversion of its peasantry, triggering the ‘Cotton Uprooting Incident’ and the coercive measures that accompanied it. This article argues that the incident reveals two analytically distinct but mutually reinforcing failures: the universalising tendencies of mid-century agronomic science, which assumed the uniform applicability of improved varieties regardless of local conditions, and the structural imperatives of centrally planned administration, which cascaded rigid quotas down the bureaucratic hierarchy without regard for local agrarian realities. By examining the agronomic profiles of competing cotton varieties, the resilience-promoting function of traditional mixed cultivation, and peasant survival strategies, this study illuminates how the obsessive pursuit of genetic purity transformed a paradigmatic scientific limitation into an administrative catastrophe. The political fallout, which catalysed the nationwide ‘New Three-Anti Campaign’ against grassroots commandism, exposes an early moment of institutional self-correction that would be progressively eliminated as the political climate radicalised toward the Great Leap Forward.