Great sparrow campaign

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The Great sparrow campaign, （Simplified Chinese: 打麻雀运动）also known as the Kill a sparrow campaign, （消灭麻雀运动）was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), initiated by Mao Zedong, the first President of the People's Republic of China. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Sparrows were included on this list because they eat grain seeds, causing disruption to agriculture.

It was decided that all the peasants in China should bang pots and pans and run around to make sparrows to fly away in fear. They would be too terrified to land and within 15 minutes of flying, they would drop out of the sky from exhaustion. This was very effective and soon after, the land was littered with thousands of dead sparrows.

The next year, the harvest was significantly better than the year before with no sparrows, but they had overlooked the fact that sparrows also eat locusts. Locusts swarmed the country the following year and a famine hit China. From 1959 to 1961, an estimated 30 million people died of starvation. Though there were many factors aside from the locust swarms, particularly the collectivization of the farmland.