Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

When Mao would boast about his country’s industrial prowess, which he did often, he tended to couch it in terms of steel output. China would overtake British steel production within three years! It would overtake America within ten years! Steel mills were ordered to go flat out to try to hit those targets, and when that wasn’t enough the Chinese population was ordered to build “backyard furnaces” into which they would throw junk metal in an effort to make steel. That junk metal included pots and pans used for cooking, tools and ploughs used for farming, wagons and cans used for carrying and holding water. Homes were torn down so the wood and thatch could be burned as fuel; whole forests were stripped of trees (something which triggered floods in the following decades); millions of peasants were pulled off the fields to mind the furnaces.[7] Mao called it the Great Leap Forward, and it certainly boosted iron production, but since neither the chairman nor many of his advisors understood the difference between iron and steel, they were dismayed to discover that much of what came out of the backyard furnaces they had commissioned was brittle, useless iron—not steel. And that metal nonetheless had a terrible cost. In the following years China experienced the worst famine in history. Tens of millions of people—the final toll is still debated today but conservative estimates range from 17 to 30 million—died of starvation and fatigue in those four years between 1958 and 1962. Some...