"All make Steel"

Steel is the key to progress in both the agricultural and industrial fields and the drive for more steel has become a major theme in everyday life.

The core of China's iron and steel production capacity is represented by the great iron and steel complexes of Anshan, in the North-east, and Wuhan in Central China. These have been extended and modernised so that today some of the units, such as the Number 1 giant automatic blast furnace at Wuhan, rank among the largest and most up to date in the world.

These centres have been supplemented by the construction of a new major iron and steel base at Paotow (annual steel capacity 3 million tons) and by smaller plants in different parts of the country; four of these have an annual steel capacity of over 600,000 tons.

Perhaps the most striking and distinctive unit, however, is the small-scale native-style furnace. I must have seen hundreds of these all over China—in a park in Canton, in the playground of a Peking school, rising in batches amid the fields of rice or vegetables on many of the communes visited. It was claimed last autumn that some 700,000 had been built. They vary in size and design but are built by the local people — peasants or townsfolk — from local raw materials and use the coal and iron ore deposits which are widely distributed throughout China.

On some communes they are worked by more or less specialised production teams. Elsewhere, and in the cities, they are worked by part-time workers — peasants, office workers, or professional workers who arrive in droves to put in an evening shift at the furnaces; at one Peking university neither staff nor students of the geography department could be found—they were putting in a day's field work building a group of furnaces out in the countryside.

The furnace has become a focus of local enthusiasm; in the work of construction and firing the old barriers between the classes are broken down and a new unity forged. By the autumn of 1958 it was estimated that 20 million people were directly engaged in iron and steel production. The target for 1959 is 18 million tons of steel.