Great Sparrow documentary

The campaign against sparrows was initiated by Mao Zedong, the President of China. Officially, the Four Pests campaign was one of the most significant actions in the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962. The four pests designeated for elimination were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The activities did improve the harvest at first, but later on locusts swarmed the country and contributed to the famine. This documentary shows how the Great Sparrow campaign was executed.

The Great Sparrow - part II

The scientists had autopsied the digestive systems of dead sparrows and found that most of the contents were harmful insects and just a tiny fraction was human food. All the evidence suggested a sparrow was actually a beneficial bird for humans. By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized that sparrows also ate a large amount of insects when rice yields after the campaign were substantially decreased due to the increase of insects. Chairman Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with bedbugs. However, it was already too late. With no sparrows to eat the locust populations, the country was soon swarmed. During the crisis an estimated two billion sparrows throughout the China had fallen. Read more about the Great Sparrow campaign...

The Great Sparrow

Over fifty years ago China faced a cultural revolution, when Chairman Mao Zedongwith changed economy focus to heavy industry. A radical socialist campaign called the Great Leap Forward was designed to mobilize the country's vast rural peasantry. It included a massive series of plans designed to achieve rapid increases in China's industrial production. The main goal for China was to catch up with the United States and England. Before that time, China had been a mostly agrarian society. At the beginning the amount of crops and cotton was doubled. This initial success in 1958 led to ambitious goals for 1959 but the weather didn't cooperate. Fewer crops were harvested, rural officials overstated the amount of grain for fear of not meeting their quotas creating imbalance in the system. Result was Four Pests campaign in order to exterminate mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. Read more about the campaign here.