Truly, we live in the worst timeline
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Mao era backyard forges making pig iron
Except it's 21st century Americans burning coal to power a tiny generator to mine miniscule amounts of crypto to hit Trump quotas so as to afford 75mL of raw milk for their family
Tell me more,
So communes in China were encouraged to produce steel during the Great Leap Forward to help with the modernisation of China.
However, many (but not all) communes lacked the ability to produce steel straight up. Sometimes due to equipment, other times due to a lack of expertise or materials. These small scale blast furnaces (think of your classic medieval RPG forge/furnace, with coal, ore, flux and a "blast" of pressurized air from a blower of some type) would reliably smelt copper from copper ore and "pig iron" from iron ore, which is a brittle high carbon iron, much weaker than cast iron or wrought iron. Also, this method was fairly archaic, it's a literal pre-medieval technique as the first step for producing steel
While many critics point to this as a policy failure because many contemporary steel mills in the west and USSR could smelt iron ore then work it into steel without an intermediate step, en masse and electric, pig iron itself isn't a wasted or useless product because it can then be worked into wrought iron or steel at a higher temperature furnace.
This was all roughly 5-6 years before China's first successful nuclear bomb, as a frame of reference.
This context really does change the way the way the west talks about the GLF
superpower speedrun any %
If you take 3 steps back and 10 steps forward, you're still way ahead of people who are debating the necessity of progress due to nostalgia for the past. Even by the liberals' metric, the population and life expectancy of China went up exponentially during the so called "mass murders".
为人民服务。
Amazing
>Rebuilding from the second world war
>Rebuilding from the civil war
>Catching up on healthcare and education
>Reforming society after millenia of misogyny, feudalism, colonialism, warlord banditry and classism
>Taking earthquakes, families, droughts, floods and typhoons on the chin
>Dealing with the Sino Soviet split
>Target of propaganda, foreign funded colour revolutions and hostile economic policy and internal division
>???
>So feared that the imperial core is dedicating billions to pay for propaganda against you, funding your rivals, tariffing your goods and blocking scientific co-operation instead of spending said money on welfare or healthcare
>About to overtake the richest country in the history of the world, which had a head start of having free slave labour and stolen land
Khrushchev you fucking dipshit. You absolute nonce. What could have been if you weren't such a short sighted piece of shit, I could be writing this on Mars right now.
Damn families, Engels was really unto something
Anyways,
It's also my understanding that this was also used as a means of dealing with supply and logistics issues in the country. If a remote rural village needed new tools in time for harvest season, it was unlikely they would arrive in time and the food would be lost, but if they had self-sufficiency and could manufacture their own tools, they could still manage well enough. Obviously it didn't work out as well as it was intended, but the western media often presents this as "dumb Communist China so primitive they use medieval methods to make steel." So I do think it is important to push back on that side of the narrative. There was a problem, and this was intended as a stop-gap solution to that problem.
We're making a sparrow czar, folks