> It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes Or. Maybe china was facing the threat of nucle

> It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes Or. Maybe china was facing the threat of nuclear attack from both the soviet union and the united states, who both had absolute aerial superiority over china, and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population? It's the simple idea of not having all your eggs in one basket. It's better to have 1,000,000 small producers of steel than 1 major producer of steel when you are facing nuclear armed adversaries. It's also why china didn't start to urbanize until after they produced enough nukes and icbms to guarantee their own safety. Just like Bush didn't want to waste a $5 million missile to take out a $5 tent in afghanistan, nukes are pretty much useless against an un-urbanized nation. There were studies done by the US government on nuclear war vs soviet union and china. All the studies showed that even though china had a much larger population, our nuclear attack on the soviet union would be far more devastating because the soviet union was urbanized whiles china was decentralized and rural. It's so funny how these people who were doing such inefficient and pointless activities set the foundation for china to eventually usurp the united states. We've been told how incompetent and backwards "the ccp" are and yet we are told that they are our top threat? Which is it? So much of what's written about china turns out to be nonsense propaganda when you just take a closer look. Could it be that mao and the communists were smarter than people who write wikipedia articles or just read them passively without giving it any thought?