Chairman Mao’s Disastrous War on Sparrows

The Great Leap Forward

When Mao Zedong seized power in 1949, China was an agrarian society with most people living in rural areas, using ancient manual farming techniques. Mao wanted to change all this by transforming the nation into a modern, industrial economy through a radical campaign known as “The Great Leap Forward.”

Introduced in 1958, Mao's grand vision involved purchasing ready-made factories and superior military technology from Russia. To finance this, the Chairman needed to sell vast amounts of China's grain on international markets.

So the Communist party seized land from peasants, reorganising vast swathes of rural China into collective plantations. Here, millions of people were expected to toil not for profit but for “the greater good.” All harvests were claimed by the state, and workers were only fed if they met impossibly high production targets. This system soon proved unsustainable, as the relentless drive for industrialisation led to widespread famine and social unrest.

The Eliminate Sparrows Campaign

Just a few months into “The Great Leap Forward,” Chinese society began falling apart at the seams. In desperation, peasants began resorting to robbery, violence, and there were even isolated reports of cannibalism.

Despite the turmoil, consistently good weather throughout 1958 seemed to promise a productive harvest. But, with the labour force either dead, dying or redirected to industrial work, much of the wheat yield was left to rot in the fields. Never one to admit fault, Mao claimed the problem lay not with his policies but with the nation’s birds eating the people’s grain. So he issued an absurd diktat:

The Chinese people were called to eradicate every last sparrow.

Mao’s plan to eradicate sparrows was part of his broader “Four Pests Campaign” which also encouraged Chinese people to cull mosquitos, rats, and flies.

One of his maddest ideas was the war on the sparrows. He has the Chinese running around, beating pots and throwing rocks at sparrows, keeping them awake until they fall dead from the sky.

Dr Jonathan Clements, author of 'Mao'

Disastrous Consequences

Chairman Mao failed to consider the avian cull’s knock-on effect. With the birds gone, the crops were blighted by caterpillars and locusts the following year. Again, rather than accepting responsibility, Mao doubled down. He ordered government officials to embark on a campaign of cruelty, ostensibly to punish peasants for their supposed failures. In the frenzied atmosphere of hallucinatory hunger and sheer desperation, farmers and labourers were tortured or executed on the spot.

Mao’s bizarre war on sparrows will go down in history as one of the cruellest and catastrophically misjudged government policies of all time. Its tragic consequences serve as a stark reminder of the dangers of political hubris and the importance of understanding ecological balance.