Life Lessons
How China’s War on Sparrows Killed Millions of Humans
A hard lesson in ecology
China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ campaign is widely regarded as one of the biggest disasters in human history. Initiated in 1958 by Mao Zedong, leader of China’s Communist Party, the Great Leap Forward included an ambitious plan to transform agrarian rural economies into an industrialised agricultural super-system which would easily produce enough grain for the burgeoning population. In trying to maximise grain output, though, Zedong became obsessed with the idea that one of the biggest enemies to his Grand Plan was the humble sparrow. But in the end, China’s war on sparrows killed millions of humans.
Based on reports that every sparrow consumes 4.5 kilos of grain per year, he reasoned that for every million sparrows exterminated, the country’s farmland could feed an extra 60,000 Chinese citizens. He declared them the enemies of Communism and mobilised almost the entire population of 600 million Chinese people to exterminate them.
New laws were passed to allow the unrestricted and indiscriminate slaughter of sparrows by any means necessary, and the entire population was mobilised against them, with rewards being offered by the government for each sparrow killed.
The carnage was immeasurable. Drums, gongs, pots and pans were beaten to drive the sparrows from every roost, every nook and every cranny, allowing them no rest until they fell, exhausted to the ground.
Baby sparrows starved to death in their nests, or were located and destroyed. Fledglings and adults were trapped in their millions, or shot with slingshots, air guns and rifles.
And it almost worked — by 1960 it’s estimated that hundreds of millions of sparrows had been massacred and the species was almost extinct in China.
But Mao Zedong had overlooked a vital factor. By the time he realised his mistake, a terrible impending humanitarian disaster was unavoidable.
The disaster wasn’t completely without warning — people had tried to caution Zedong about his plans, but he hadn’t listened. He desperately tried to backpedal, but it was too late.
The vital factor Zedong had ignored, to the detriment of the Chinese people, was that sparrows don’t just eat grain — they also eat a lot of insects and other invertebrates, many of which are considered pests by arable farmers. In particular they eat a lot of locusts… and bedbugs!
With the sparrows gone, the insect populations exploded and swarms of locusts devastated crops and ruined harvests all over China. A devastating famine ensued in which people died in their millions, their misery only compounded by the plagues of bed bugs which crawled everywhere, biting and spreading disease.
An estimated 55 million humans were killed by starvation, disease and social unrest as a result.
In an effort to restore balance and end the famine, China eventually had to import 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union — a hard lesson in ecology and no doubt a humiliating one, to boot.
Despite all his power, all his ambition and all his grand plans, Mao Zedong had failed to acknowledge what people all over the world had known for millennia — when we make war on Nature, we make war on ourselves.