The Great Sparrow Campaign (Communist idiocy)

I saw that episode and this is more proof that Mao Zedong's ill-advised Great Leap Forward was a disaster that may have killed as many as 45 million people.

I’ve got a hearing disability. Could you give me a paragraph summary? :o)

The video on YouTube is close-captioned.

I didn't watch the video but I guckduckgo'd the phrase "great sparrow campaign of china"...

The "Four Pests" campaign was introduced in 1958 by Mao Zedong, as a hygiene campaign aimed to eradicate the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease: the mosquitos responsible for malaria; the rodents that spread the plague; the pervasive airborne flies; and the sparrows – specifically the Eurasian tree sparrow – which ate grain seed and fruit.[1] The government also declared that "birds are public animals of capitalism".[2] As a result of this campaign, many sparrows died from exhaustion; citizens would bang pots and pans so that sparrows would not have the chance to rest on tree branches and would fall dead from the sky.[3] Sparrow nests were also destroyed, eggs were broken, and chicks were killed. In addition to these tactics, citizens also resorted to simply shooting the birds down from the sky.[4] These mass attacks depleted the sparrow population, pushing it to near extinction.[4] Furthermore, contests were held among enterprises, government agencies, and schools in cleanliness.[3] Non-material rewards were given to those who handed in the largest number of rat tails, dead flies and mosquitoes, or dead sparrows.[5]

At dawn one day last week, the slaughter of the sparrows in Peking began, continuing a campaign that has been going on in the countryside for months. The objection to the sparrows is that, like the rest of China's inhabitants, they are hungry. They are accused of pecking away at supplies in warehouses and in paddyfields at an officially estimated rate of four pounds of grain per sparrow per year. And so divisions of soldiers deployed through Peking streets, their footfalls muffled by rubber-soled sneakers. Students and civil servants in high-collared tunics, and schoolchildren carrying pots and pans, ladles and spoons, quietly took up their stations. The total force, according to Radio Peking, numbered 3,000,000.[6]

Some sparrows found refuge in the extraterritorial premises of various diplomatic missions in China. The personnel of the Polish embassy in Beijing denied the Chinese request of entering the premises of the embassy to scare away the sparrows who were hiding there and as a result the embassy was surrounded by people with drums. After two days of constant drumming, the Poles had to use shovels to clear the embassy of dead sparrows.[7]

By April 1960, Chinese leaders changed their opinion due to the influence of ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng[2] who pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of insects, as well as grains.[8][9] Rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased.[10][9] Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bed bugs, as the extermination of the former upset the ecological balance, and bugs destroyed crops as a result of the absence of natural predators. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[10] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine, in which 20–45 million people died of starvation.[11][12]

Thanks for posting. I worked in China starting in Fall 1976 for eight months and saw lots of Chinese kids killing small birds with air rifles. I noticed that the many places I visited from deep south to far north had few birds. This explains it.

Their ONE CHILD policy has also turned into a disaster. By only allowing one child females were aborted and or killed after birth.

Today there are 33 million more men then there are woman.

What kind of problems will this difference create for china?

https://www.whatsonweibo.com/china-now-335-million-men-women/

Thank you. Catastrophically horrible. And a parable of sorts, surely.