Great Leap Forward backyard furnaces in China

In the 1960s, Mao Tse-tung in China decided he was going to industrialize China, and as part of the Great Leap Forward, all the communes were supposed to have their own cast iron cupola. So instead of making pottery and clay utensils, they were going to make cast iron. Mao Tse-tung was leading China right into the 16th century. By 1975, ten years later when he passed away and they opened up China, all of a sudden between '75 and '85 we were flooded with little cast iron trinkets, because every commune now had to try to figure out some way to get currency. I have a cast iron Christmas tree stand that was made in China. This was the beginning of Made in China — the modern Made in China. China had probably half of the world's cast iron capacity in these little inefficient, environmentally unsound cupolas — maybe sort of Saugus Iron Works fancy. Now they've gotten rid of a lot of that and gone upscale. There's apparently one town in China that makes 90% of all the world's neckties. They learned to specialize.