Mao: The Unknown Story

ANOTHER FIASCO that drained the peasants’ energy, and brought disaster, was an order from Mao that the entire nation had to “make steel.” The Superpower Program needed a lot of steel — and steel was also Mao’s yardstick for superpower status. When he boasted to Communist leaders in Moscow in 1957 that China would “overtake Britain in fifteen years” (which he later shortened to three) and when he told the Chinese he was fully confident that China could “overtake America” in ten years, steel output was what he had in mind. Mao set the 1958 target at 10.7 million tons. How this came about illustrates his broad-brush approach to economics. Sitting by his swimming pool in Zhongnanhai on 19 June he said to the metallurgy minister: “Last year, steel output was 5.3 million tons. Can you double it this year?” The yes-man said: “All right.” And that was that.

Steel mills and related industries like coal mines were ordered to go flat out to speed up production. Rules, and common sense, were cast aside. Equipment was overworked to the point of breakdown, and over 30,000 workers were killed in serious accidents alone within a few months. Experts who tried to talk sense were persecuted. Mao set the tone for discrediting rationality by saying that “bourgeois professors’ knowledge should be treated as dogs’ fart, worth nothing, deserving only disdain, scorn, contempt …”

Even going flat out, the existing steel mills could not fulfill Mao’s target. His response was to order the general population to build “backyard furnaces.” At least 90 million people were “forced,” as Mao said matter-of-factly, to construct such furnaces, which Khrushchev not unfairly dubbed “samovar” furnaces, and which produced not steel at all, but pig iron, if that.

To feed these furnaces, the population was coerced into donating virtually every piece of metal they had, regardless of whether this was being used in productive, even essential, objects. Farm tools, even water wagons, were carted off and melted down, as were cooking utensils, iron door handles and women’s hair-clips. The regime slogan was: “To hand in one pickaxe is to wipe out one imperialist, and to hide one nail is to hide one counter-revolutionary.”

Across China yet more peasant houses were torn down, and their occupants made homeless, so that the timber and thatch could be burned as fuel. Most accessible mountains and hillsides were stripped bare of trees. The resulting deforestation was still causing floods decades later.

The furnaces required constant attention, consuming vast amounts of labor time. Tens of millions of peasants, plus a large proportion of draft animals, were pulled out of agriculture, leaving only women and children to bring in the crops in many places. By the end of the year, some 10 billion work-days had been lost to agriculture, about one-third of the time that would normally have gone to producing grain. Though the total 1958 crop output was slightly up on 1957, there was no increase in the amount harvested.

As the year-end deadline approached for his steel output goal, every time Mao saw his managers he would use his fingers to count the days left, and urge them: “We must make it!” By 31 December, the 10.7 million tons figure was reached, but as Mao acknowledged to his top echelon, “only 40 percent is good steel”; and more than 3 million tons were completely useless. The “good” steel had been produced by proper steel mills; the useless stuff from the backyard furnaces, almost all of which were soon abandoned. The whole venture, a gigantic waste of resources and manpower, triggered further losses: in one place, local bosses hijacked shipments of high-quality Russian alloys and had them melted down so that they could claim a bumper output, called an “Iron and Steel Sputnik.” “No good at constructing, but super-good at destruction”: never was Mao’s own assessment of himself more accurate.

MAO WASTED MUCH of the technology and equipment bought from Russia, along with the skills of the accompanying specialists. Machinery often lay idle, as the gigantic industrial infrastructure they required was lacking. The equipment that was working was overworked, often twenty-four hours a day, while maintenance was neglected or dismissed as irrelevant. Mao encouraged ignoring regulations, and told those Chinese who were working with Russian advisers that they must not be “slaves” to Russian expertise. Russian pleas for common sense got nowhere. Even the very pro-Chinese chief adviser Arkhipov was rebuffed. In 1958, he told us, “I asked Chou and Chen Yun to try to persuade Mao to keep his ideas to himself, but Mao wouldn’t listen … They said to me: Very sorry; Mao didn’t agree with the Soviet side.” In June 1959, Soviet deputy premier Aleksandr Zasyadko, a metallurgy and missile silo expert, visited China and afterwards reported to Khrushchev that “They’ve let the whole thing go to pot.”