2. The Plan to Produce Steel in Backyard Furnaces Backfired
People went out of their way – or more accurately were forced to go out of their way – to satisfy the Great Leap Forward’s expectations of communal steel production. To meet the quotas demanded by the Chinese authorities, citizens 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, they melted whatever steel objects they could find in order to produce steel girders.
However, the manufacture of steel is complicated, and the artisanal girders produced were of low quality and cracked easily. What came out of the backyard furnaces was actually not even steel, but pig iron. It had to get its carbon removed in order to become steel. In some regions where there was little metalworking tradition or knowledge of metallurgy, the pig iron produced was too useless to get turned into steel. Still, that was not the worst part of the Great Leap Forward.
