“Birds are the animals of capitalism,” declared Mao Zedong’s Chinese communist government in 1958, claiming that sparrows they ate the hard work of the proletariat. Later he would carry out a massacre of this type of bird that would have gigantic ecological consequences in the country, killing millions of people. But to understand this moment in history, you have to start from the beginning.
Mao, who was known for inciting farm workers to rebellion, became the first president of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. And when he ruled the world’s most populous nation, under the guise of bringing the prosperity under the communist regime, launched important urban and agricultural reforms.
One such initiative was dubbed the “Great Leap Forward.” It was an economic and social campaign to convert China from an almost entirely agrarian nation to a Marxist industrial powerhouse. The main objectives of the movement were to increase the production of cereals and bring industry to the countryside. That affected almost all aspects of the lives of the citizens and, as we will see below, the animal kingdom was not spared either.
One of Chairman Mao’s first actions during the “Great Leap Forward” was the Four Plagues Campaign. It was a plan to stop the spread of disease by eliminating the country’s main pests: mosquitoes, rodents, flies and sparrows. The first three were eradicated to improve the hygiene and health of the population, but the fourth ones were the cause of another evil: they ate too much grain. And Mao wanted the grain to be exclusively for the people. As Chinese journalist and environmental activist Dai Qing wrote: “Mao did not know anything about animals. He did not want to discuss his plan or listen to the experts. He simply decided that the four pests had to be killed.”
You have to understand that at this point in history, the Chinese were going through hard times. First, by adapting to collectivization and agrarian reforms. And second, they watched as these birds ate their livelihood. Chinese scientists had calculated that each sparrow consumed 4.5 kg of grain each year and that for every million sparrows killed there would be food for 60,000 people. Armed with that, Mao launched his all-out war against the sparrows.
A widespread massacre
Barely a year after coming to power, Mao passed a law urging citizens to participate in sparrow hunting. This led them to bang on pots and pans to scare them out of their natural habitat. nests were destroyed and any birds found were killed. “They shot at them, people destroyed nests and eggs, but the strangest method of extermination was to chase them making a lot of noise until they dropped dead from exhaustion,” explained Dutch historian Frank Dikötter in his book The great famine in Mao’s China.
They also arranged numerous scarecrows throughout the country. And the “militias” were fully organized and made up of primary and secondary school students, government office employees, factory workers, farmers and the People’s Liberation Army itself. Young they poisoned the birds everywhere, and in the parks 150 free shooting zones were set up to shoot the sparrows.
It is not known what the official number of sparrows killed because of this campaign was, but if we take into account that the government mobilized all the people of the country for the eradication, if only each person killed one sparrow, it can be estimated that they would have eliminated more than 600 million. The result was as expected: the sparrow nearly became extinct in China.
The subsequent famine
For Mao, the measure was working wonders. And he was convinced that such efforts were saving the country two kilos of rice per sparrow per year. But the slaughter would actually come at a very high price. He created a much more devastating ecological problem for crops and citizens.
Within a year, China realized that sparrows ate not only crops, but also pests, such as the lobsters. And without the sparrows to curb the growing insect population, the locusts invaded the field unhindered, with no predators in sight, and in a far more drastic manner than if the birds had been allowed to stay.
Consequently, agricultural production that year was disastrously low. And the little harvest was followed, obviously, by a famine. Basically people ran out of food in their homes and stores. According to official estimates, up to 15 million people died from starvation, while some researchers claim that the number of actual deaths was between 45 and 70 million. Such was the desperation that the People’s Republic of China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to stop the infestation, which later morphed into one of bedbugs.
The idea of killing the sparrows had enormous economic and social consequences in China, including crimes and food theft and it also led Mao into a political crisis that ended in a Sino-Indian war (an easy target at the time for China) in 1962, given protests in his own country against deaths attributable to his “Great Leap Forward.” “. An animal as insignificant as a sparrow had changed everything.
Although it is true that for many experts and historians it is difficult to prove that there is a direct correlation between the killing of birds, the plague and the subsequent famine, John Platt, an environmental journalist, explains in this BBC report that “it is not wrong to say that the campaign against sparrows contributed to this massive famine, but there are factors that made it worse all”.
The “Great Leap Forward” did not turn out to be the key to improving the economy that the government hoped for. The mobilization of labor from the countryside to steel production and construction caused crops to rot in the fields. Encouraged to grow the steel sector, many peasants left the rural world to work in factories and, therefore, the harvests were not enough to meet consumption.
And meanwhile, under Mao’s government there was much corruption and ecological devastation of the rural world. During those years, various policies led to widespread deforestation and bowed to nature by wanting to industrialize the nation at lightning speed. On the other hand, extreme weather also affected the entire country, with a brutal drought in 1960 and later floods.
What China has learned is that on planet Earth, billions of species coexist in harmony to sustain life. And, if a single plant or animal is removed from an ecosystem, the entire balance of the natural cycle can be thrown off. Tragically, throughout history humanity has disregarded this principle. And that has caused him big problems.
The Chinese leader Mao always said that nature should be at the service of human desires and needs, and not the other way around. his motto Ren Ding Shen Tian (“Man must conquer nature”) became part of his speech. In 1958 he declared: “Make the high mountain bow its head; make the river give way.” He was wrong.
Images: Wikimedia Commons / Chineseposters.net
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