10/14/2026
In 1955 Mao Zedong named the four pests China had to eliminate: rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. The first three spread disease. The sparrow made the list for a single reason, which was that it ate grain.
At the end of 1957, as the Great Leap Forward took shape, the campaign went nationwide, and in 1958 the whole country was mobilized against the bird.
A sparrow cannot stay in the air for long without resting, so the order was to keep every one of them flying.
Crowds beat gongs, drums, washbasins and iron buckets, set off firecrackers and waved red flags from rooftops and treetops. Schoolchildren tore down the nests, and the eggs and chicks inside were destroyed.
Beijing ran the campaign on a timetable.
The People's Daily reported residents chasing sparrows every morning and again from 4:00 to 7:30 in the evening, the hours when the birds left and returned to their nests.
In one three-day offensive in April 1958, some 3 million people in the capital took to the streets and rooftops. The city reported more than 400,000 sparrows killed.
The sparrows took refuge on the grounds of Poland's embassy in Beijing, and the diplomats refused to let the crowds in.
The crowds surrounded the embassy and drummed for two days. According to a Polish press account, the staff were clearing out dead sparrows with shovels when it was over.
China's own biologists had warned against it.
In the autumn of 1956, the Chinese Zoological Society met in Qingdao to discuss the sparrow. Zhu Xi, director of the Institute of Experimental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, spoke first. He argued that wiping out the species needed serious study.
Sparrows peck at grain in autumn, the biologists pointed out, but the rest of the year they eat huge numbers of insects and insect eggs.
The campaign went ahead anyway.
Within two years the Eurasian tree sparrow had nearly disappeared from China.
Nobody could verify the counts reported up the chain, but the official figures for sparrows killed reached about 2 billion.
The sparrows had also been eating the insects that eat grain.
With the birds gone, nothing kept the pests in check. Locusts and other insects surged through the fields, and by the spring of 1959 the trees lining the streets of Shanghai and other cities had been stripped almost bare of leaves.
Economists have now measured the damage.
In a 2025 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Eyal Frank, Shaoda Wang and three co-authors compared Chinese counties whose habitat suited sparrows with counties whose habitat did not.
After the campaign, yields fell further wherever sparrows had been most common. They estimate that the killing of sparrows explains 19.6% of the drop in China's crop yields during the Great Famine, and nearly 2 million deaths.
The sparrow order was one mistake inside a bigger plan.
The Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 killed an estimated 16.5 to 45 million people. Most of those deaths trace to the Great Leap Forward itself: forced collectivization, officials who inflated harvest reports to meet their targets, and grain requisitions calculated from those inflated numbers.
The requisitions made the sparrow losses deadlier, because the state took its quota whether or not the insects had reached the fields first.
On March 18, 1960, in a directive on health work, Mao wrote: "Stop killing sparrows, and replace them with bedbugs."
The new slogan became "Eliminate rats, bedbugs, flies and mosquitoes," and within weeks the sparrow was formally struck from the list.
According to reports, China later imported 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to rebuild the population it had destroyed.
One man decided which animal China no longer needed.
Millions of people carried out his order, the biologists who knew better were overruled, and nature answered with locusts.
Central planners misjudge far more than prices. They misjudge everything their plan cannot see, and the people who carry out the plan pay for the mistakes.
Save this for the next time someone says nature would be safer under socialism. Send it to a friend who believes a planned economy would take better care of the planet.
