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), and officially, the Four Pests campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.
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[edit] Campaign
The campaign was initiated by Mao Zedong, the first President of the People's Republic of China. Sparrows were included on the list because they ate 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 the sparrows fly away in fear. Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs were broken, their nestlings were also killed.[1]
Initially, the campaign did improve the harvest. By April 1960 the National Academy of Science found that sparrows ate insects more than seeds. Mao declared "forget it" (算啦, suan la), and ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows.[1] By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward and adverse weather conditions, leading to the famine. From 1959 to 1961, an estimated 38 million people died of starvation.[2]
[edit] Revived campaign
In June 19, 1998, a poster was spotted at Southwest Agricultural University in Chongqing, "Get rid of the Four Pests". 95% of households were ordered to get rid of the same pests. Except this time, cockroaches were substituted for sparrows.[1] A similar campaign was spotted in the spring of 1998 in Beijing. This time, people did not respond to either of these campaign style approaches.[1]
[edit] Popular culture
- Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun, a post-rock album based on the event by the group Red Sparowes.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- PBS series "The Peoples' Century -- 1949: The Great Leap"
- Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
- China follows Mao with mass cull (BBC)
