Source: PEKING REVIEW Vol.1 No.3, March 18, 1958
The operators of an open-hearth furnace in Anshan, China’s key steel city in the north-east, established a national record with a daily average of 10.64 tons of steel per square metre of the furnace hearth area. This came close to the record of 10.77 tons held by the Magnitogorsk iron and steel combine in the Soviet Union. It will add a further 1.20 million tons of steel this year, if the efficiency of the rest of Anshan’s open-hearth furnaces is raised to this level.
The Iron and steel plant In Taiyuan.north China, has successfully introduced the method of three tapping troughs to lead molten steel to the casting ladles. This will revolutionize iron and steel production in China. With this new method, Taiyuan will be able to raise its steel output by 42 per cent.
In Kirin Province, which is becoming an important chemicals centre, two paper mills on the Tumen River made headlines. On March 4, one mill shortened the time for one digester of sulphite unbleached pulp from 7 hours 20 minutes to 4 hours 51 minutes. This tops the best time in Canada and other advanced paper-making countries. Two days later a second mill further reduced the time for this process to 4 hours 10 minutes. This record was broken on March 8 with an average time of 3 hours 55 minutes. With this acceleration of the pulp-making process the five-year targets of the two paper mills are expected to be fulfilled in one year.
In Shanghai, the new efficiency of China’s international cable operators took their colleagues in London by surprise. It used to take at least half an hour to get service messages from Shanghai to London, and 20 minutes the other way round. Shanghai shortened the time for service messages to London to 3 minutes 18 seconds, about six times faster than the London-to-Shanghai service. The cable operators in London congratulated the Shanghai operators on the speed of the service replies from Shanghai and said they would try to be as fast.
In Dairen the dockers have established a new record in per-hatch hour loading which beats London’s. In loading and unloading cement, for example, the per-hatch hour in London ranges from 30,480 to 33,820.8 kilogrammes. The figure reached by the Dairen dockers is 40,000 kilogrammes. Ships in Dairen are now loaded and unloaded faster than in London,
These are but five examples of the current “leap forward” in China. There’s a method to these records, a method sweeping the country and known here as “to compare with the advanced, learn from the advanced, and overtake the advanced."
Peking Review Index | Chinese Communism | Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung