Foreign Languages Press

Set immediately after Fanshen, William Hinton’s seminal book on land reform in China, "Iron Oxen" takes the reader through the early stages of the State’s collectivization of agriculture and its first mechanized crops. This book is a captivating account of the heady days just before and after Liberation as a teacher in China’s first tractor school, where students sat on bricks in classrooms without roofs and eventually and jubilantly learned how to do emergency field repairs on giant Soviet combines. Hinton also ollows the narrative with an epilogue where he explains how, in hindsight, the various struggles in production he faced were early encounters with the line struggle that came to the fore in later years.