More than half a century has passed since the infamous story of the destruction of sparrows in China. This campaign was included in textbooks on ecology in many countries around the world, clearly showing the fallacy of simplistic and scientifically unfounded approaches.
The current generation of ornithologists are not aware of all the details of that ancient history, but it had its own Vavilovs and its Lysenko.
In the winter of 1955, a nationwide movement began in China to eliminate the Four Pests: sparrows, mice, flies and mosquitoes. Young and old, men and women, absolutely everyone took part: students left their classes, officials stopped working in offices, and thus deafening sounds of gongs and drums were heard throughout Beijing, scaring the sparrows out of their nests and chasing them to complete exhaustion while they did not fall dead. Nets and poisoned baits were used in open areas. After three days of continuous noise in Beijing, almost all of the sparrows were dead.
The following year, the Zoological Society of China held its second national meeting in Qingdao, Shandong province, at which the issue of sparrows was raised. Some scientists accused these birds of eating a lot of grain, calling them "house thieves". Since tens of thousands of sparrows live in the open agricultural landscapes of China, scientists called for the complete destruction of these grain robbers. At the same time, some other colleagues noted that sparrows are beneficial by killing a large number of insects, so they should not be exterminated. Various opinions were voiced and heated debates flared up.
In February 1958, the Communist leader and Chinese ruler Mao Zedong approved a decree on the extermination of small pests: mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows. On this day, the country made a big mistake, for which it paid off with an unprecedented famine and destruction of the people.
The idea of exterminating birds in the PRC was announced at the beginning of 1957 at the annual congress of communists. The author of the initiative was the biologist Zhou Jian, who at that time was the deputy minister of education of the Celestial Empire. It turned out to be easy for him to convince Mao Zedong of his own righteousness: at that time the country felt the need to solve the problem of a bad harvest, so the Great Leap Forward program was launched here. It was believed that the destruction of rats, flies and sparrows would lead to the flourishing of the agricultural sector in the country.
Mao Zedong did not have to be persuaded. He spent his childhood in the village and knew firsthand about the eternal confrontation between peasants and pests. The decree was happily signed by him, and soon all over the country the Chinese with the slogans "Long live the great Mao" rushed to destroy the small representatives of the fauna designated in the decree of their leader.
Promotional video:
The entire Chinese people believed in the leaders and began to destroy all the representatives of the fauna indicated on the list. The citizens hoped that this would help get rid of hunger, because they would kill those who eat them right in the fields. However, it immediately became very difficult to catch and destroy rats, mosquitoes and flies, and it was the birds that became easy prey.
At first, they decided to poison the birds, sometimes to catch them, but this kind of approach turned out to be ineffective, and then the citizens united to achieve the goal. At the sight of birds, every resident of the PRC tried to intimidate them so that they would remain in the air for as long as possible.
Absolutely all citizens were waving rags and making loud sounds only for the sake of complete exhaustion of the birds. As a result, the sparrows fell exhausted to the ground, where they were finished off by the crowd. Almost all small birds in the Middle Kingdom were hit then, and soon their population became much smaller. In just three days after the law was introduced, about a million birds were killed in the country's large cities, and in a year the Chinese killed more than two billion of these animals. Chinese citizens were already enthusiastic about the fight against "pests", but the government and the media constantly "added fuel to the fire" by publishing pictures of mountains of dead sparrows. By that time, everyone had already forgotten about flies, mosquitoes and rats, which also fit under the extermination law, since it was extremely difficult to fight them.
Schoolchildren easily left lessons to destroy birds' nests, and children who excelled in this matter were given certificates. The Chinese were jubilant and considered the destruction of the sparrows a victory and none of the scientists objected to this, since such actions could be regarded as a protest.
By the end of 1958 there were almost no birds left in the PRC, which was touted as an impressive achievement for the nation, and in 1959 the country had an extremely rich harvest. However, all kinds of pests, for example, caterpillars and locusts, became many times more, but this was accepted by citizens as an insignificant cost. A year later, the pests began to multiply in such numbers that the people completely lost their crops. The authorities tried to remedy the situation and sent workers and children to work in the fields to collect pests on their own, but these measures became useless. Insects multiplied too rapidly, because it was not regulated naturally - by birds. When the pests ate the crops from the fields, they began to destroy the forests, and there was famine in the country.
Too late, the peasants realized that the sparrows were in fact their great allies in the fight against harmful insects. By April 1960, enemy bed bugs had replaced sparrows, but by this time sparrow populations in parts of China had already been completely wiped out. In Yunnan province, a botanist recalled how Mao himself urged to deal with sparrows, but then abruptly canceled the campaign. We dropped sparrow nests, broke eggs and killed chicks. Later, scientists began to write that sparrows eat insects, the National Academy of Sciences released reports on how many insects sparrows eat in comparison with the amount of grains eaten. And we stopped beating these birds. As soon as Chairman Mao said "xuanle" (forget about it). In those days, one man's word meant everything.
The authorities tried to prove to the citizens that this was temporary trouble, but hunger began to take the lives of people, which caused panic. People ate leather goods, locusts and even their compatriots. According to conservative estimates, about 30 million people died in the Celestial Empire. Then the government turned to the USSR and Canada with a request to send them as many sparrows as possible, and the neighboring countries reacted positively. Carriages of sparrows arrived in the PRC, destroying unprecedented populations of insects that literally covered the whole of China.
Despite the apparent foolishness, the spirit of the campaign against the Four Wreckers has not completely disappeared from China. A poster, dated June 19, 1998, posted on the public wall of Southwestern Agricultural University, exclaimed, "Get rid of the Four Pests," just like it did during the Great Leap Forward. Cockroaches replaced sparrows or bed bugs, but other "pests" were the same - rats, flies, and mosquitoes. 95% of homes and workplaces were ordered to be cleaned of a certain percentage of pests by the target date. It seemed incredible that such goals could be achieved and that the locals would react positively to such a campaign.
Of course, this cannot be done in a jump, but the systematically carried out deratization in large cities of the USSR and other socialist countries was successful, precisely because of the ability to divide the city into sections and systematically process it with the proper intensity. With private property and freedom of entrepreneurship, this is unattainable, since Deratization firms competing with each other are de facto interested in preserving synanthropic rodents. Accordingly, with equal organizational efforts and technical capabilities, the "socialist city" was cleared better than the "capitalist" one. It is no coincidence that everything collapsed with the advent of capitalism, although specialists and scientific developments (so far) remained.
It is impossible to calculate how much grain was lost due to insect infestation after sparrows were beaten, especially considering other factors affecting grain yield. And the state's attention to the 1958 harvest was insufficient due to the main emphasis on steel smelting. The Chinese often cite this campaign to combat the "Four Pests" as the cause of the country's long-term environmental imbalance. The mass beating of sparrows remained an absurd episode in the useless mobilization of human energy in order to dramatically change the world around us. The story was also a prime example of how the controversial attitudes of the Mao era towards nature were translated into real steps and actions (Shapiro 2004).
In fairness, it should be noted that a massive attack on pests was not an invention of Mao - he had predecessors at the beginning of the 20th century, but he surpassed them by the organization of mass actions of people and the scale of impact on the ecosystem (Garret 1970). In recent years, it has become possible to watch videos of this sad story on the Internet. China's tragic experience in this regard has warned other countries against a possible repetition of such companies.
It is important to note that the PRC had not only failures, but also outstanding achievements that were impossible in "old China." So, one of the laureates of the current Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is a Chinese woman, who in those very years developed a medicine for malaria, which has remained the most effective until now.