Quote:
Originally Posted by simplicitus
On a semi-related note, I remember seeing in some documentary that during the Great Leap Forward steel was so scarce that Chinese peasants were encouraged to make it using small furnaces.
Not quite. They werent short of steel, they were trying to generate way more steel to carry out industrialization... so all the peasants ended up melting down every nail, plough, shovel and buckle in the countryside to generate a bunch of useless steel.
It didnt end well. Between 30 and 45 million people died, which puts it up there as possibly the worst thing that people have done to each other in history.
In slightly lighter news. They also had a war on sparrows.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
The entire country banged pots and pans for weeks so the sparrows were too panicked to sleep and they fell out of the air dead...
Which of course led to a plague of locusts and other insects