9. DIY Home Steel Furnaces Turned Out to be a Bad Idea
Making steel is complicated – something that Mao and his fervent followers ignored when they pushed the idea of DIY backyard furnaces. The steel girders produced were of low quality and cracked easily. Technically, what came out of the backyard furnaces was not even steel, but pig iron, which had to get its carbon removed to become steel. In some regions with little metalworking tradition or an understanding of metallurgy, the pig iron produced was too useless to get turned into steel.
The backyard furnace fiasco was not the worst part of the Great Leap Forward, however. Mao and his followers sought to revolutionize China’s countryside, where most of the population toiled as peasants. So they prohibited private farming, and ordered mandatory agricultural collectivization – combining communities’ private plots into big fields, belonging to the entire community. As with Stalin’s collectivization, the result was a disaster – but on a far greater scale.
