6. The Great Leap Forward Took China Back
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong came up with a brainstorm to rush China from a backwards peasant society and into a modern industrial one in just a few short years: The Great Leap Forward. A hallmark of the idea was that increased steel production – a benchmark of industrialization – need not wait for the development of infrastructure such as steel plants, or the training of a skilled workforce. Instead, intrepid Chinese could produce steel by using blast furnaces in the back of their communes – literal backyard furnaces. People used whatever fuel they could get their hands on to power the furnaces, from coal to wooden furniture to the wood of coffins.
When they lacked iron ore, the Chinese melted whatever steel objects they could find to produce steel girders. However, making steel is complicated, and the girders produced were of low quality and cracked easily. What came out of the backyard furnaces was actually not even steel, but pig iron, which had to get its carbon removed to become steel. And in some regions, where there was little metalworking tradition or understanding of metallurgy, even the pig iron produced was too useless to even get turned into steel.
