Mass steel campaign (1958)
대제강 운동 (1958)
The Great Leap campaign in which, after the Beidaihe conference of August 1958 set that year’s steel output at 10.7 million tonnes, double that of 1957, some 90 million people were mobilised to smelt iron in “native furnaces” (backyard furnaces) built of earth. The target was met in numbers, but much of the steel was unusable, and by taking labour from the harvest it left the crops of autumn 1958 to rot in the fields, one of the causes of the Great Famine.
In depth
The steel target in the plan at the start of the year was 6.248 million tonnes. After Mao promised in Moscow in November 1957 to “catch up with Britain in fifteen years”, the metallurgy minister Wang Heshou and the planning chief Li Fuchun raised the target in turn, and the Beidaihe conference, declaring that steel was “the key link”, settled on 10.7 million. In September Zeng Xisheng of Anhui showed Mao a steel ingot from a native furnace, and Mao urged the method on the whole country. By the end of 1958, 90 million people, two-fifths of the national workforce, were making steel. Short of iron ore, peasants went into the hills to dig instead of into the fields, cut forests for fuel and melted down household pots and farm tools.
Of the 11.08 million tonnes of steel announced for 1958, 8 million were up to standard, and of 13.69 million tonnes of pig iron, 9.53 million. The State Statistical Bureau put the losses of native steelmaking at 5 billion yuan; another estimate puts those of the whole campaign at 20 billion. The 1959 steel target was cut from 30 million tonnes to 18–20 million, and actual output was 13.87 million. Early at Lushan in 1959 Mao called the backyard steel drive a “great catastrophe” while defending it as proof of mass enthusiasm and creativity, and Peng Dehuai wrote in his letter that it had brought “losses as well as gains” and imbalance. The campaign also left the first large-scale ecological damage of the People’s Republic through mass deforestation and pollution.