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DIY Steel Manufacture
Mao Zedong’s regime came up with the misguided idea to get people to set up blast furnaces behind their communes – literal backyard furnaces. The Chinese 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 to produce steel girders. As it turned out, steel manufacture was more complicated than Chairman Mao had imagined. 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. It had to first get its carbon removed, before it could get turned into steel.
In some regions, where there was little metalworking tradition or knowledge of metallurgy, even the pig iron produced was too useless to get turned into steel. Mao’s backyard furnace plan was a fiasco, but it was not the worst part of the Great Leap Forward. The Chinese dictator and his followers hatched another misguided idea to revolutionize China’s countryside, where most of the population toiled as peasants. The communist regime prohibited private farms, and ordered mandatory agricultural collectivization – the combination of private individual plots into big fields, that would then belong to the entire community.