7. The Campaign to Wipe Out a Small Bird
Chairman Mao’s labor-intensive plan for rapid industrialization gave birth to the Great Leap Forward in 1958. It was intended as a revolutionary modernization campaign to leapfrog China from a peasant economy into an industrial giant. To kick off the modernization and increase efficiency, “The Four Pests Campaign” was launched, to exterminate flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows. Flies, mosquitoes, and rats spread diseases, and rats ate and ruined grains on top of that. Sparrows were included because they also ate grains and fruits.
The Chinese government calculated that each sparrow ate about four pounds of grain per year, plus an indeterminate amount of fruits eaten or ruined by their pecking. Multiply that by hundreds of millions or billions of sparrows, and that is a whole lot of lost grain and fruits. So sparrows were designated as one of “Four Pests” slated for extermination, and a merciless eradication effort was launched against them. The campaign succeeded in what it had set out to do, and sparrows were all but wiped out in China. However, as seen below, their extermination backfired in a big way.
