> Mao Zedong defended backyard furnaces despite the shortcomings, claiming that the practice showed mass enthusiasm, mass creativity, and mass participation in economic development.
At least with sparrows they sort of acknowledged they screwed up. But the steel furnace comment, reminded me of the local municipality, where we carefully sorted recyclables into multiple streams, which later turned out were dumped into a single landfill. Eventually, the municipality told people to stop sorting the materials, and just use the one bin, but people refused and raised complaints. The city understood their error, apologized, and reverted their decision, letting citizens perform their sorting ritual, but in the end still dumped everything into one large landfill.
That was surprising. I knew about the sparrows and the famine, but had no idea about them being imported later by the hundreds of thousands.
> The diversion of labor from harvesting crops to steel production and construction meant crop supplies were left to rot in fields.
That was often done in badly built smelters which were not able to produce quality steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
From the wikipedia article:
> Mao Zedong defended backyard furnaces despite the shortcomings, claiming that the practice showed mass enthusiasm, mass creativity, and mass participation in economic development.
At least with sparrows they sort of acknowledged they screwed up. But the steel furnace comment, reminded me of the local municipality, where we carefully sorted recyclables into multiple streams, which later turned out were dumped into a single landfill. Eventually, the municipality told people to stop sorting the materials, and just use the one bin, but people refused and raised complaints. The city understood their error, apologized, and reverted their decision, letting citizens perform their sorting ritual, but in the end still dumped everything into one large landfill.