Traditional Chinese Iron Industry and Its Modern Fate

This text explores the economic history of the traditional Chinese iron industry in the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on the interactions between technological, economic and geographic factors. Four separate regions of China are examined, considering the traditional technology of iron production and the ways in which the technologies changed and developed in confrontation with foreign competition and the burgeoning modern sector of China's iron industry. Violent changes in the economic geography of Chinese industry were caused by foreign competition, World War One, the Sino-Japanese War and China's isolation in the first few decades after 1949. The last episode in the modern fate of the Chinese iron industry occurred during the Great Leap Forward of 1958-59, when the traditional iron-production technologies played a part in an enormous effort to expand iron and steel production and to being China out of a situation of economic gridlock. Overall, that campaign was a massive failure, but it had some practical successes which have generally been overlooked.
Many of the book's findings are counter-intuitive and should provide food for thought in the study of Third World industrial development. The book does not skimp on technical details, but aims to make them as comprehensible as possible for the general reader.