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Re:Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II by kens on Friday September 25, 2020 @03:49PM (#24593451)
I recently learned about the bizarre idea of "backyard furnaces". Around 1958, Mao Zedong decided the way to modernize was for every neighborhood to build numerous small blast furnaces and manufacture iron. These hundreds of thousands of furnaces needed constant fuel, leading to massive deforestation. Most of the iron was low quality or unusable, so the backyard furnaces were abandoned after a few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60_Q-kAZbXA

Re:Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II by throckmortra on Friday September 25, 2020 @05:07PM (#24594105)
Many of his ideas were ill-conceived:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Re:Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II by sudosysgen on Friday September 25, 2020 @08:52PM (#24595517)
Mao was indeed a really bad administrator. It is said that he would have been remembered much more fondly if he died just after the success of the revolution.

Pretty much half of the decisions he made led to a disaster.

Re:Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II by wahern on Saturday September 26, 2020 @12:01AM (#24596313)
The rise of Xi Jinping in China suggests that the memory of Mao's mistakes has long since faded, not just among the masses but also among the leadership. All the procedures and norms put into place to prevent another Mao from taking control have been systematically removed to give Xi Jinping greater power. I think the process started with Hu Jintao, who also held several key offices simultaneously, but the accumulation of power under Xi seems more transparent and deliberate and therefore more naive on the part of the leadership.