i stumbled upon this story on wikipedia the other day. it sounds like one of those stories you’re told when you’re a child, the kind that you’re supposed to figure out the “lesson” in the end. i leave that bit to you.
The Four Pests campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.
The campaign was initiated by Mao Zedong, the first President of the People’s Republic of China. Sparrows were included on the list because they ate grain seeds, causing disruption to agriculture. Additionally, Mao was annoyed one morning when a sparrow stole his toast as he was eating breakfast outside. It was decided that all the peasants in China should bang pots and pans and run around to make the sparrows fly away in fear. Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs were broken, their nestling were also killed.
Initially, the campaign did improve the harvest. By April 1960 the National Academy of Science issued that sparrows ate insects more than seeds. Mao declared “forget it”, and ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward and adverse weather conditions leading to the famine. From 1959 to 1961, an estimated 38 million people died of starvation.