Preface

Forty years ago, I was a farmer in a village named Nanniwan (南泥湾) in northern Shaanxi Province (陕西省). Each early spring, the men in the “production team” (生产队) went to the nearby hills, chopped down the bushes, and burned the grass around the farmland, so the farmland kept expanding each year. The farmland was mainly located on the hillsides of two narrow valleys, both having a length of around 20–30 km and a width of no more than 200–300 m.