Published : 2024-12-23
On December 23, 1978, Shanghai Baoshan Iron and Steel Plant (上海寶山鋼鐵總廠) held a ground-breaking ceremony.
Shanghai Baosteel is one of the symbolic products of China's Reform and Opening-up. Its designed capacity is an annual production of 6 million tonnes of steel and iron each.
It is not only the largest project approved since the founding of New China, but also the most invested, technologically advanced, and challenging project in the history of China's steel industry and even Chinese industrial history.
The construction of Shanghai Baosteel is closely related to Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平).
In October 1978, Deng visited Japan and toured the Kimitsu Steel Works of Nippon Steel Corporation. He was greatly shocked by the modernisation level of Japan’s steel industry and the economic development gap between Japan and China.
Deng Xiaoping said at the time, "Just build a steel plant like this for China." This visit of Deng Xiaoping accelerated the pace of Baosteel’s construction.
It is worth mentioning that the choice to build the steel plant in Shanghai does not actually conform to the traditional thinking of China's steel industry, because Shanghai has neither mines nor coal.
It is reported that when initially deciding to introduce Japanese technology to build a large steel enterprise, the country considered a dozen places such as Lianyungang, Tianjin, and Dalian.
However, as China's largest industrial city, only Shanghai had the industrial foundation and comprehensive capability at the time to support the construction of a modernised steel base.
At the same time, Baosteel, from its design stage, drew on Japanese experience and used imported iron ore that was cheap and of good quality, making Shanghai's conditions uniquely favourable.
