Some time in 1958, Chairman Mao established his ‘Four Pests’ campaign, ordering the extinction of rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows.
Yes, sparrows. According to the popular old mass murderer, they were too numerous, and were eating the grain and food that should otherwise have been feeding his people. Four pounds of grain per year, per sparrow, is what they said.
So, starting in Beijing, the people got to it with a vengeance. 3,000,000 people went out into the streets, gardens and fields to slaughter every last sparrow. They shot them, poisoned them, disturbed their breeding sites, smashed eggs and tore down nests. Students were let off college to do it; schoolchildren were issued with rifles; old people were kicked out into the fields with pots and pans to make any noise they could. In Shanghai, alone, on Day One, 194,432 sparrows were killed. No one can even estimate how many birds died, but one expert opinion I read said around one for each human, so around 700 million.
Only in the foreign embassy grounds around the cities were the sparrows safe, and even then they were literally drummed out of the gardens by the people outside.
In April 1960, the policy was quietly ended, and sparrows were replaced on the ‘four pests’ list by bed bugs. It turned out that sparrows had been doing an awful lot of eating, as Mao suggested, but what they had actually been eating were the locusts, grasshoppers who fed off the rice and the grain that fed the Chinese population. And the weed seeds that would go on to choke the crop if uneaten. And the caterpillars and aphids. And so on. A predictable famine ensued, possibly the worst in human history, and tens of millions of mainly poor Chinese citizens died.
In an act of supreme irony, they actually bought 250,000 sparrows from their friends in the USSR, but it was to no avail. The damage was done.
What Chairman Mao was exceptionally good at, a quality which many leaders from Nicola Sturgeon to Jair Bolsonaro share, was creating a convenient enemy to blame everything that has gone wrong on. In a way, they all do it. Whether any or all of the blame is fair is neither here nor there if it all serves its purpose to distract people from the general crap-ness around them.
A contested quote (attributed to anyone from Churchill to Santayana) reminds us that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Which, given President Trump’s early comments on Twitter in the last few days as to who is to blame for what is going on in downtown US right now, probably tells us everything we need to know about how the November election is going to be fought. Not prettily.
I’m not sure he’s a big one for books, but I could heartily recommend that he gets sent a copy of Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine before he goes much further.
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