Infrastructures of Scarcity: Backyard Furnace, Tufa Technology, and the Longevity of the Tufa Infrastructures in the Rural Built Environment

This paper explores the nature and application of Tufa (often translated as local/native methods) in China’s industrial production and infrastructure construction since the Great Leap Forward. The first part of the paper presents a revisionist interpretation of the tufa by examining steelmaking during the height of the Great Leap Forward, the first national-scale campaign to promote the tufa method in industrial production. This case is instrumental in understanding what tufa meant for the technocrats and national leaders, and why they understood it as a possibly viable way to stimulate local steel production. I argue that despite the fervor in everyday politics and production during the GLF, tufa was not anti-intellectual, historically rooted, or draw from certain political tenets, as many popular and scholarly narratives claim. Instead, it was a make-shift method to simplify complicated production processes in the yang (foreign) products. It was an expedient strategy for popularizing industrial infrastructure under conditions of acute technological and productive scarcity. The second part of the paper explores the continuation of tufa practices in the rural areas. Despite the disastrous ramifications of the Great Leap Forward, tufa was still regarded as a laudable way of conducting local industrial production and infrastructure construction and many of the Tufa constructions, such as hydropower stations and dams, dominated the rural built environment until the 21^st century.