In 1949, the People’s Republic of China was founded by Mao Zedong, after a period of civil war. Nine years later, in 1958, Zedong launched the famous, but doomed, social campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. Through this, he aimed to increase China’s economy and industry, transforming it from a rural, agricultural nation to a thriving communist society.
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“Backyard furnaces”, used to produce steel in the Great Leap Forward.
One of the first actions taken in this Leap was known as the Four Pests Campaign. It was so named because it sought to eradicate four unwanted types of animals - flies, which carried typhoid, mosquitoes, which carried malaria, rats, which carried the plague, and - most famously - sparrows.
The first three seem like understandable choices, but why sparrows? The government, at the time, believed that Eurasian tree sparrows ate crops such as rice and grain, though in truth their effect on production was more or less negligible. They were also thought of as “public animals of capitalism”, so there’s that.
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Through propaganda such as the posters above, the populace were convinced that sparrows were vile birds, to be exterminated. The results were… quite remarkable. Many took up arms and shot them out of the sky on sight. The unarmed would bang pots and pans whenever they saw sparrows resting on branches, in a (somewhat futile) effort to kill them by exhaustion.
One day, an alleged force of 3 million citizens marched through Beijing, on the hunt for the feathered vermin. When the city’s Polish Embassy refused to let them enter to scare away the sparrows, it was surrounded by drumming protestors, non-stop, for 2 days. As you’ve probably guessed, all this was not good for the sparrow population.
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By 1960, the Eurasian tree sparrow was nearly extinct in China, less than two years after the launch of the Four Pests Campaign. However, the influential ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng managed to convince Chinese leaders to end the sparrow eradication, pointing out that they were important predators of insects. Mao replaced sparrows with bed bugs, but the damage had been done.
With no sparrows to keep them in check, locust populations exploded. They swarmed the country, demolishing crops like the birds never could. This plague of locusts was the nail in the coffin, adding to a perfect storm of factors - all results of Zedong’s Great Leap Forward - and causing the Great Chinese Famine.
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This famine, lasting from 1959–1961, was the worst period of starvation in recorded human history. While the Chinese government dubiously reported 15 million casualties, other estimates conclude that at least 45 million people died.
For the poor of China during this time, life would have been hell on Earth. Villages and roadsides were littered with corpses, and pets had disappeared from most settlements - guess why. One man, according to a well-known Dutch historian, was force-fed excrement for stealing a fellow villager’s sweet potato. As in potato, singular.
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During the Great Chinese Famine, the birth rate in the country dropped to lower than it had ever been (before the one-child policy). The government tried desperately to cover up the devastation from Mao, assembling fake lush fields of grain when he visited agricultural regions.
In addition to the tens of millions which starved, millions more were beaten or tortured to death, and millions more again committed suicide. And all this because of the misguided actions of one man, trying to advance his country.