The complete immersion into Communism opened the door for one of the government’s main ideas: to exploit nature for human benefit. For this reason, Mao made his slogan, Ren ding shen tian, which means “Man must conquer nature.” His belief that natural assets like rivers and mountains could be controlled by man, as their purpose entirely was to serve man, was seen in the Great Leap Forward as well as in the Patriotic Health Campaign (which includes the Four Pests Campaign). The phrase “transform the nation,” found in the duties and goals of the CCP in the Patriotic Health Campaign, correlates with Mao’s dream for China’s progress. In particular, he believed that the Four Pests would advance his country’s agricultural production by removing impediments like sparrows, one of the four pests, which ate the grains and diminished the health of the producers. In his calculations, one sparrow consumed 4.5 kg of grains a year, leading Chairman Mao to state that for every 1 million sparrows killed, there would be food available for 60,000 people. According to this logic, by controlling nature and eliminating sparrows, Mao saw agricultural production as the stage on which his triumph would be played.
Historically, China had been able to accomplish massive projects because of its greatest advantage: a colossal labor force. By mobilizing the efforts of hundreds of millions of people together, mostly anything set out by the leader to be done, could be done. As a result, Mao sought to mobilize the peasant masses to concentrate on agriculture and industry using a tool that he often turned to his advantage: propaganda. For example, one of the propaganda posters used for the extermination of sparrows (The Great Sparrow Campaign) in the Four Pests Campaign had the caption, written in, “Everybody comes to beat the sparrows.” In this poster, two children are depicted; a young boy is holding a slingshot, presumably aimed at a sparrow not shown in the image, while a younger girl is holding several dead sparrows. The overall message is that the sparrow is the enemy, and suggests there is a war between man and nature. The rural village in the background emphasizes the effort put into this campaign by the people who live in the countryside. It also reveals that Mao saw the farmers as the key to his program; they are the brawn behind everything. Furthermore, the use of children in the poster draws in a community effort, as it presents a fact that even the youth are helping this effort. Having a mass work-force of hundreds of millions of people not only accelerated the country as a whole, but also accelerated Mao Zedong’s visions of improving both the industrial and agricultural sectors of China.
Unlike the Soviet Union, which focused more heavily on industry, China spread its efforts across two production areas, both of which demanded harsh quotas and grueling expectations. Now that the peasants had to fixate on industry and agriculture, their whole lives revolved around production. Yet the peasants found trouble with agriculture. In collectivizing the labour force of peasants, Mao had completely changed the lives of those who lived in the rural areas, they “were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood.” In the spring of 1958, Mao accelerated collectivization and increased agricultural targets. His slogan was, “going all out, aiming high, and achieving more, faster and more economical results.” This slogan suggests that nothing would hinder Mao, not even the lives of rural peasants. Mao focused entirely on the results and would defy anyone and do anything to obtain those results.
One of the main ways to achieve his objectives was the Great Sparrow Campaign, which drew on the peasants’ emotions and sense of a community to persuade them to join the campaign. Meant for use in school, one poster titled “Eliminating the last sparrow,”developed in 1959, exemplifies the heedless nature of the campaign. This poster features a sequence of two images, the first of which has a group of nine males, almost all holding shotguns, surrounding a barren tree with a lone sparrow resting on a branch. The next photo on the poster is the same group of males (adults and adolescents), but this time, they are surrounding the “last sparrow” that they just killed. All smile broadly, doubtless because they recognize their actions as beneficial and praiseworthy. This poster, by combining various age groups, demonstrates that eliminating sparrows and the other four pests requires everyone. Successfully recruiting a broad community effort is one of the main things that catapulted the Great Sparrow Campaign into such astonishing results in such a short time.
The equation for improving agricultural production was unbalanced and unworkable without commitment from the people. The numbers of people involved in these campaigns were not limited to those living in the countryside; all citizens were in a war with the pests, notably the sparrows. Their personal accounts express what would happen daily, ranging from building scarecrows to continually banging kitchenware all for the sole purpose of exterminating sparrows and protecting their grain. People played their roles successfully—almost too successfully. Despite the impressive data, their personal stories and experiences reveal a darker side to the numbers. By November of 1958, less than a year into the campaign, 1.98 billion sparrows were killed. The primary technique used to eliminate the birds was to keep them flying until they died of exhaustion, which normally took four hours. To achieve this, citizens fired guns, drummed, and did anything that they could do in order to keep the birds in the air:
I saw that a young woman was running to and fro...waving a bamboo pole with a large sheet attached to it...I realized that in all the upper stories of the hotel, white clad females were waving sheets and towels that were supposed to keep the sparrows from alighting on the building...During the whole day, it was drums, gunshots, screams, and waving bedclothes...The strategy behind this war on the sparrows boiled down to keeping the poor creature from coming to rest on a rod of tree…[I]t was claimed that a sparrow kept in the air for more than four hours was bound to drop from exhaustion.
The above account discloses the efforts used in the Four Pests Campaign. And almost every citizen was involved, as Mao put the Campaign as one of the highest priorities, emphasized by the description of the Campaign as a war. The resulting noise—screams and gunshots—left no room for negligence, or thinking that the war against the sparrows was insignificant.
Mao exploited many other avenues in this campaign. In addition to mobilizing the peasants in the countryside, he targeted citizens in the cities. In Peking, every morning at 5 A.M., the radio would broadcast the song, “Arise, arise, O millions with one heart; braving the enemy’s fire, march on.” This revolutionary anthem was sung for the students going out to battle the sparrow population. They would bang cymbals, blow whistles, and beat kitchenware, using the same technique of making the sparrows die of fatigue. Education and regular activities were replaced with the duties of a soldier at war with the sparrows.
The Results
The Great Leap Forward and the Four Pests Campaign did not increase grain quantity, but resulted in the opposite. Sparrows play many roles, and not all of them are harmful to agriculture. They are the main predator for locusts, an insect which has a diet that primarily consists of grass and grain. The Desert Locust, specifically, targets the last moist part of the plant beneath the ear, causing complete loss of the grain. With the elimination of the sparrows, locust populations boomed and locust swarms would feast on the grain across the country. Locust outbreaks were common starting in the 1940s in China, as outbreaks occurred 1-2 years after El Niños and droughts. Floods and droughts created environments ideal for locusts to lay their eggs, as the survival rate increased with lack of rainfall. The largest damage often occurred just before the harvest was taken, “as swarms of locusts would obscure the sky and cover the countryside under a bristling blanket, devouring the crop...In the Jingzhou region more than 50,000 hectares were devastated.” The amount of grain that the growing population of locusts ate was far greater than what the sparrows would have eaten. Chairman Mao either did not know how to, or did not care to, make the calculations.
If Mao had heeded the experts or even listened to his fellow members of the CCP, the Great Famine would probably have not occurred. He knew little about the environment or animals, and this deficit, combined with his refusal to consult, led to the death of 45 million people. Mao knew one thing only about the plans he was executing; sparrows eat grain. He ignored the issues of biodiversity, and refused to contemplate how removing sparrows might affect the ecology in China. Chinese experts had expressed opposition to this idea, but Mao distrusted intellectuals; in fact, he had millions of academics denounced and killed, so that no one would be able to criticize him. Mao raised ignorance to a higher level by disregarding and disposing of opposing opinions, with disastrous results. The pattern of eliminating anyone who criticized his actions carried on to the Lushan Conference, as we will see. Mao’s pride made him and his country vulnerable to disasters.
The extermination of sparrows was also accompanied, ironically, by China’s ceaseless exports of grain, despite its starving citizens. In early 1959, in a secret meeting, Mao ordered the seizure of more than 30% of the available grain, an unprecedented rise in demand. Regarding the issue of exporting grain while people were dying of starvation, Mao observed, “It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” The Chairman evidently was not concerned about his rapidly declining population, and as suggested by his words, encouraged the deaths of some so that others might be content. Mao placed China’s economic success above his people’s lives—illustrating where his true loyalty lay.
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The Endgame
In the winter of 1960-1961, the government discovered how bad the situation had become and began to import grain and food from the West in efforts to rebuild the population. In January of 1962, Liu Shaoqi noted that the famine was caused by man, eroding support for the Chairman. Once Mao recognized that the Great Leap Forward and the killing of sparrows needed to stop and that he made “severe mistakes,” he was forced to import more than 200,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replace China’s wild population. During this transaction, even the Soviet Union’s scientists recognized the obvious fact that experts were not consulted, and that Mao acted solely on his own. Mao Zedong only acknowledged the reality that he had squandered the lives of his people when investigations revealed what his decisions had created.
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