Communist party Chairman Mao Zedong disdained the cities and put his faith in the Chinese peasantry for a Great Leap Forward. Mao saw steel production as the key to overnight economic modernization, promising that within 15 years China's steel production would surpass that of Britain. In 1958 he decided that steel production would double within the year, using backyard steel furnaces run by inexperienced peasants.  The plan was a fiasco, as the small amounts of steel produced were of very poor quality, and the diversion of resources out of agriculture produced a massive famine in 1959–61 that killed millions.
With economic reforms brought in by Deng Xiaoping, who led China from 1978 to 1992, China began to develop a modern steel industry by building new steel plants and recycling scrap metal from the United States and Europe.  As of 2013 China produced 779 million metric tons of steel each year, making it by far the largest steel producing country in the world.  This is compared to 165 for the European Union, 110 for Japan, 87 for the United States and 81 for India. China's 2013 steel production was equivalent to an average of 3.14 cubic meters of steel per second.