On Dead Sparrows and the Great Leap Forward

Poor Dead Sparrow 

Stephen Alexander (2017)

I pretty much like all birds (with obvious exceptions, such as the vulture, ostrich and flamingo). But, mostly, I like the little birds that live in my garden; robins, blue tits and sparrows. The latter in particular hold a special place in my affection and the fact their numbers have fallen in England so dramatically over the last forty years is a cause of great sadness. I miss their company.  

Not only do I not trust people who fail to find sparrows anything other than delightful, but I despise those who would wish them harm; be it Queen Elizabeth I or Chairman Mao. The former, for example, passed a law in 1556 that branded sparrows as vermin and placed a small bounty on their tiny heads. Whilst for the latter, sparrows were one of the four main pests in the People's Republic of China (the other three being rats, flies, and mosquitoes) and, in 1958, Mao launched a public campaign of extermination as part of the so-called Great Leap Forward.

All citizens, including solders and schoolchildren, were instructed to loudly bang pots and pans and to shout and scream at the birds, thus preventing them from resting in the trees or on rooftops. As a result, the exhausted and terrified sparrows literally fell dead from the sky. Nest were also destroyed, eggs smashed and chicks killed.

Starting in the countryside, the campaign eventually moved to the towns and cities, including Peking, where staff at foreign embassies watched on in horrified amazement. The personnel of the Polish Embassy - to their great credit - refused to allow any bird abuse on their premises, but Chinese citizens surrounded the building and began two days of constant drumming. As a result, even the sparrows that had sought refuge in the embassy were eventually killed.

By 1960, however, this mad avian genocide had resulted in a plague of crop-destroying insects of biblical proportions. With rice yields falling and faced with an ecological catastrophe, Mao was obliged to redirect the campaign away from bourgeois sparrows - all birds were regarded as animals of capitalism by the communist regime - and towards bedbugs.

Unfortunately, it was too late and a famine followed that was so severe in nature, that tens of millions of Chinese starved to death. And whilst that's not usually something I'd be flippant about, in this case one can't help feeling that it serves 'em fucking right.