The slogan was mainly addressed to the secondary sector of the economy,[8] of which steel and grain were top priority.[9] At the end of China's first Five-Year Plan, steel output was still less than a quarter of the amount produced by Britain.[10] Mao found overtaking Britain's steel to be of utmost importance to the "socialist transformation" of agriculture, as he found the two to be "inseparable" and unable to be dealt with "in isolation from each other". This was due to the increased need for agricultural machinery to be developed, as well as the agriculture tax that would fund the production of heavy industry.[10] The justification for the selection of Great Britain and the United States as the focuses of the slogan was likely developed from the desire to prove socialist countries as more prosperous and fruitful than their imperialist counterparts, a sentiment that is likewise encapsulated in related Maoist slogan "The East wind prevails over the West wind".[10]
In 1958, steel production rates had skyrocketed, as Soviet-aided steel plants went into widespread use after being constructed in the mid-1950s.[11] The politburo meetings of August 1958 declared that production of steel would be set to double within the year.[12] As a result of the newly set goal and strong ideological push for progress, people's communes began to dedicate most of their labour toward manufacturing efforts of the material. "Backyard steel furnaces" were created, where peasant workers would smelt household metal objects such as chairs and cooking utensils in fervent efforts to meet the high levels of demand. This lead to significant impacts on peasant life within the communes, as reallocation of production priorities lead to a shortage of agricultural labour in the autumn of 1958.[11]
In the end the goal was met on the original time frame. Chinese steel production exceeded that of the UK in the 1970s and that of the USA in 1993, becoming the largest steel producing nation worldwide in 1996.[14]
^ abcNiu, Chung-Huang (1958). China Will Overtake Britain. Foreign Languages Press.
^ abLieberthal, Kenneth (2004). Governing China: from revolution through reform (2nd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN978-0-393-92492-3.
^Chan, Alfred L. (2001). Mao's crusade: politics and policy implementation in China's great leap forward. Studies on contemporary China (1. publ ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-924406-5.
