The Great Sparrow Csampaign

The Great Sparrow Campaign

The campaign against the 'Four Pests' was initiated in 1958 as a hygiene campaign by Mao Zedong, who identified the need to exterminate mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. Sparrows were on the list because the Eurasian Tree Sparrows ate the grain seeds, robbing the farmers of the fruit of their labor. One of    the purposes of the campaign turned farming into a collective, state-sponsored activity. Individual, private farming was banned as part of China's transformation into a communist system. One of Zedong's first actions after collectivizing agriculture was probably intended to protect the farms. The sparrows ate the seeds and seemed to be a major hindrance to the work of farmers. Everyone from the elders to those just learning to walk participated. They would shoot and shake the trees so the sparrows could not perch on the trees and they would fall out of the sky. The others were shot out. Locusts, in particular, swarmed over the country, eating everything they could find. Including crops intended for human food. People, on the other hand, quickly ran out of things to eat, and millions starved. Numbers vary, of course, with the official number from the Chinese government placed at 15 million. Some scholars, however, estimate that the fatalities were as high as 45 or even 78 million.  But the people did not go down quickly or easily. Documents report several thousand cases where people ate other people. The most tragic aspect is that most of those deaths were unnecessary. Though the fields were empty, massive grain warehouses held enough food to feed the entire country but the government never released it.