> The People’s Republic of China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to stop the ecological disruption.<p>That was surprising. I knew about the sparrows and the famine, but had no idea about them being imported later by the hundreds of thousands.<p>> The diversion of labor from harvesting crops to steel production and construction meant crop supplies were left to rot in fields.<p>That was often done in badly built smelters which were not able to produce quality steel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace</a><p>From the wikipedia article:<p>> Mao Zedong defended backyard furnaces despite the shortcomings, claiming that the practice showed mass enthusiasm, mass creativity, and mass participation in economic development.<p>At least with sparrows they sort of acknowledged they screwed up. But the steel furnace comment, reminded me of the local municipality, where we carefully sorted recyclables into multiple streams, which later turned out were dumped into a single landfill. Eventually, the municipality told people to stop sorting the materials, and just use the one bin, but people refused and raised complaints. The city understood their error, apologized, and reverted their decision, letting citizens perform their sorting ritual, but in the end still dumped everything into one large landfill.
The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like A Mighty Storm, Suddenly And Furiously Blinding Our Senses.<p>We Stood Transfixed In Blank Devotion As Our Leader Spoke To Us, Looking Down On Our Mute Faces With A Great, Raging, And Unseeing Eye.<p>Like The Howling Glory Of The Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous And The Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts And Clutching Our Innocent Awe.<p>A Message Of Avarice Rained Down And Carried Us Away Into False Dreams Of Endless Riches.<p>"Annihilate The Sparrow, That Stealer Of Seed, And Our Harvests Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In."<p>And By Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent In Their Puddles, The Air Barren Of Song As The Clouds Drifted Away. For Killing Their Greatest Enemy, The Locusts Noisily Thanked Us And Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole.<p>Millions Starved And We Became Skinnier And Skinnier, While Our Leaders Became Fatter And Fatter.<p>Finally, As That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That True Enemy Was The Voice Of Blind Idolatry; And Only Then Did We Begin To Think For Ourselves.<p>- Red Sparowes, "Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun"
Worth noting that poorly planned "pest eradication" campaigns were a global thing. Here in California they paid bounties on a rather wide variety of perceived pest animals.<p>Alaska actually had a bald eagle bounty, as the hunters and fishermen didn't want competition: <a href="https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=baldeagle.printerfriendly" rel="nofollow">https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=baldeagle.printer...</a>
This is why I was concerned when I heard Google, of all companies, released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out. I'm curious what happened with this effort. It's not exactly a vote of confidence when the other guy trying to do this is Bill Gates.
I wonder if any sparrow species unique to China went extinct ?<p>I did a search but no real info, the searches I found only talked about native vs imported. Not species that only exist in China.
Someone once commented to me that rather than blaming Mao personally, the blame for the negative consequences of The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution should be placed on the systemic forces that legitimised the absence of domain experts in policy making.<p>It's a nice sentiment but I have a gut feeling that these kinds of frameworks - where blame is taken away from people and attributed to abstract concepts - lead to worse outcomes long-term. Is that gut feeling just my evolutionary instincts talking or is it a sign of something useful?
I didn't realize sparrows ate insects too. The rule of thumb on the farm was "swallows good, sparrows bad". Swallows ate insects and sparrows ate grain. Maybe China could have replaced sparrows with swallows but that would probably have led to a different kind of disaster since importing species has a horrible track record.
The more things change, the more they stay the same:<p><i>Pollinating Orchards By Hand | Lessons From Sichuan, China</i> - <a href="https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by-hand-lessons-from-sichuan-china" rel="nofollow">https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by...</a>
This article has the causality inverted.<p>The sparrows were just a sideshow to distract from the famines cause.<p>Most famines were caused by the culture of face and the nature of the party. The party dictated a plan, and as failing the plan and making the great leader loose face, ment the local governments loosing face would get them Maos wrath, all the members of the party reported success when it came to harvests.<p>So Mao collected the surplus and sold it to the soviet union, who he with his inferiority complex wanted to impress. After that, starvation raged, and he knew. They all know, but feign to not know, to keep face. Instead, superficial measures are taken.<p>Like hunting scapegoats, spreading crude conspiracy theories inside the country, or hunting harmless sparrows. Busy work to detract from the actual cause.
And nothing was learned from this, cultural change was avoided and now its time to go full circle.
Another example of the peril of central planning and total authority.<p>Make me think of the climate change orthodoxy were we focus solely on co2 and forget about all the other human problems.
And whoever publicly even doubted the decision of Mao was labeled as right-wing who spread misinformation, or counter-revolutionaries who sabotaged the great socialism movement. Maybe there is some truth in the question: who's the arbiter of information?
How does the targetting of the sparrow species for annihilation in China compare to the post-Columbus ongoing deforestation in the Americas's? Xi does have the ecological health of the environment on his policy priority list which is a change from previous leadership driven by slavery to economic devop. There are documentaries on little birds by the sea. They have their place.
I've read about this several times, and I'm not surprised the story is popular. Many people see China as a foe, so they like to smear it. That's alright, but anyone should be extra cautious when a story is just what most people want. Stories tend to inflate and bend to please their auditory.<p>For instance, consider the claim that China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the USSR. Where does it come from? This article seems to be a mash-up of a few sources, mainly Wikipedia. Indeed Wikipedia has the same claim, which is sourced from the book "Mao: The Real Story", by Alexander Pantsov. The said book has just a single sentence about this: "As a result, the Chinese even had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union." A vague assertion: no source, no date, no number of birds. Searching the web only showed many deformations of this (imported from Russia (sic), or USSR and Canada, or imported a million sparrows...). I couldn't find more about this in JSTOR and SciHub.<p>Overall, I haven't see anything compelling about this detail (importing sparrows) and not much about the main claim (killing sparrows is the main cause of the famine).<p>One last thought: pesticides have killed scores of birds and insects, especially in the USA. Probably much more than the Four Pests Campaign did. And ecological imbalances have obviously suffered during the last decades: among others, bees are waning in many countries. It seems a bit hypocritical to blame Mao in the past and forget Monsanto-Bayer and Co in the present.