When China exterminated millions of sparrows (and triggered the biggest disaster in history)

Saturday, December 13, 1958, Shanghai.

As dawn broke, huge crowds began to gather in the streets. They marched through the city, filling the air with their bloodcurdling war cries and waving thousands of red flags, symbols of the Chinese communist revolution . The noise grew to a deafening volume as schoolchildren, young students, peasants, workers, and members of the People's Liberation Army all mobilized against a common enemy.

Shortly after dawn, the killing began. Under the watchful eyes of the youngest and oldest, the others embarked on a slaughter so massive that one newspaper called it "total war."

The motley army pursued their targets with relentless determination, using clubs, nets, traps, and firearms. Others banged pots and pans incessantly to disturb and confuse their prey. All the while, they uttered shouts, howls, cheers, and yells of triumph and joy.

At first, their opponents tried to band together, believing they would be safer that way. But there was nowhere to hide. Little by little, one by one, they fell to the ground, where they were shot or strangled, or simply died of sheer exhaustion.

Across China, these defenseless victims perished in city streets and countryside , in public parks and private gardens, on rooftops and in gutters. Some even fell directly from the sky before being summarily executed. By nightfall, in Shanghai alone, nearly 200,000 had died.

We are all familiar with horrific tales of violent genocide , but in this case the victims of the massacre were not human beings, but sparrows ; or, as they were dubbed by the ruling cadres of the People's Republic of China, led by the all-powerful Party Chairman Mao Zedong , one of the "Four Plagues."

The idea behind this campaign, part of a larger political and social crusade known as the Great Leap Forward and presented to the people in January 1958, was to eradicate four distinct groups of animals , all considered vermin. Colorful posters, including the particularly lurid image of the four potential victims impaled on a sword, exhorted loyal Chinese citizens to "Exterminate the Four Pests!": rats , carriers of the bubonic plague ; mosquitoes, which spread various diseases including malaria; the ever-ubiquitous and exasperating flies; and lastly—and most importantly—sparrows, which, by feeding on valuable seeds and various types of grain, threatened the annual harvest.

Of the four, sparrows became the primary target, and given the Chinese rulers' perennial fondness for slogans, what would become known as "the Great Sparrow Campaign" was soon instituted. Government scientists had calculated that a single sparrow could consume 10 pounds of grain a year; therefore, they reasoned, for every million sparrows killed , enough could be saved to feed 60,000 people . In theory, the calculations were correct; but the result would be diametrically opposed to what was intended.

After the terrible privations of the previous decade, following Mao's rise to power in 1949, the Chinese people needed all the food they could get. It was assumed that the campaign would be popular in both cities and the countryside, and would therefore help unify the nation around its supreme leader. The result was that hundreds of millions of sparrows (along with vast numbers of the other three " pests ": mosquitoes, flies, and rats ) were hunted down and killed. Their nests were destroyed, and the eggs and chicks that fell to the ground were smashed to bits. As one eyewitness would write: "Even the birds that managed to survive the initial slaughter were hunted down by the townspeople, who banged pots and pans from dawn to dusk, preventing them from breeding or settling in their nests and eventually causing them to perish from sheer exhaustion. A sparrow could be killed in several ways, and all of them were eventually employed in this deadly struggle."

Everyone was expected to participate, including the young and the old, and colorful posters were printed depicting smiling children shooting helpless birds with slingshots. Mao himself proclaimed that "All people, including children as young as five , must mobilize to eradicate the four plagues." Nor was the extermination limited to the cities; sparrows also died in the countryside, either poisoned, trapped, or caught in glue spread on tree branches.

To encourage killing, competitions were held in which those who collected the largest number of carcasses were rewarded and praised. A sixteen-year-old boy from Yunnan Province (in southwest China) named Yang She-mun became a national hero when it was learned that he single-handedly killed 20,000 sparrows . He did this by locating the trees where they nested during the day and climbing them at dusk to break their necks with his bare hands.

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At first glance, the Great Sparrow Campaign was a resounding success. It has been claimed that one billion tree sparrows died , and while this figure is likely somewhat exaggerated, there is no doubt that hundreds of millions of birds perished. Following the slaughter, the species was once on the verge of extinction in China. Several years later, in a surprising turn of events, 250,000 tree sparrows had to be imported from the Soviet Union to China to replenish the country's devastated population.

Just a few months after the Great Campaign, its terrible consequences began to be felt. In June and July 1959, the rice harvest was a complete disaster. Yields plummeted for one simple reason: although sparrows feed on seeds and grains in the fall and winter, during the breeding season they feed their hungry chicks countless millions of insects. With the sparrows gone, those same insects—including huge swarms of locusts, the most devastating pest of all—had no impediment in devastating the precious crops.

However, despite growing signs of nationwide famine— which would ultimately result in the deaths of millions of Chinese —the sparrow cull continued to be promoted and encouraged throughout 1959. Finally, toward the end of the year, Mao abruptly declared the end of the Great Sparrow Campaign , replacing the birds with bugs. This was a colossal political shift, and several articles in government media began to denounce the culling that had been so enthusiastically endorsed just over a year earlier.

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In terms of human suffering, the Great Sparrow Campaign resulted in what would become quite simply the greatest man-made disaster in our history. In less than three years, from 1959 to 1961, between 15 and 55 million people died in what would become known, in an ironic echo of earlier campaigns, as the Great Chinese Famine. To put this in perspective, the higher end of this estimate exceeds the 40 million deaths that occurred worldwide during the First World War.

Not all victims died of starvation. As American historian Jonathan Mirsky notes, refusal to participate in the Party's political campaigns "could result in confinement, torture, death, and the suffering of entire families." People were intimidated from protesting through "public criticism sessions," which often ended in violent attacks on any dissenters. The Dutch historian Frank Dikötter , author of The Great Famine in Mao's China , estimates that more than 2.5 million people were beaten or tortured to death , while up to 3 million others chose to take their own lives rather than face slow agony from starvation.

As the famine intensified and discontent grew into open rebellion, the punishments for questioning government policy became increasingly harsh. Many victims were tortured and mutilated; others were forced to eat excrement and drink urine; still others were killed by being doused with boiling water, drowned in rural ponds, or buried alive. But perhaps the most vivid horror permeates the accounts of eyewitnesses like Yu Dehong , secretary to a Party official in the city of Xinyang: "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses; then to another, and saw another 100 corpses. No one paid any attention. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. That's not true, I retorted: people had eaten the dogs long ago."