The Key to China’s Future Is Its Past: “From Commune to Capitalism” reviewed by Against the Current

From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty
154 pp, $25 pbk, ISBN 978-1-58367-698-1
By Zhun Xu

Reviewed by Promise Li

“Today China’s geopolitical ambitions grow as quickly as its own contradictions. With the Jasic worker-student strikes last year and Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests earlier this summer, it is time to consider the economic and political alternatives to neoliberal globalization from the perspective of the Chinese working class. ¶ From Commune to Capitalism disputes the long-established claim that the decollectivization of Maoist-era peasant communes was better for the economy and an initiative wholly championed by the peasantry….”

Read this review at Solidarity/Against the Current, Sept.-Oct. 2019