Killing sparrows led to famines in China
historydefined.net
historydefined.net
That was surprising. I knew about the sparrows and the famine, but had no idea about them being imported later by the hundreds of thousands.
> The diversion of labor from harvesting crops to steel production and construction meant crop supplies were left to rot in fields.
That was often done in badly built smelters which were not able to produce quality steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
From the wikipedia article:
> Mao Zedong defended backyard furnaces despite the shortcomings, claiming that the practice showed mass enthusiasm, mass creativity, and mass participation in economic development.
At least with sparrows they sort of acknowledged they screwed up. But the steel furnace comment, reminded me of the local municipality, where we carefully sorted recyclables into multiple streams, which later turned out were dumped into a single landfill. Eventually, the municipality told people to stop sorting the materials, and just use the one bin, but people refused and raised complaints. The city understood their error, apologized, and reverted their decision, letting citizens perform their sorting ritual, but in the end still dumped everything into one large landfill.
We Stood Transfixed In Blank Devotion As Our Leader Spoke To Us, Looking Down On Our Mute Faces With A Great, Raging, And Unseeing Eye.
Like The Howling Glory Of The Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous And The Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts And Clutching Our Innocent Awe.
A Message Of Avarice Rained Down And Carried Us Away Into False Dreams Of Endless Riches.
"Annihilate The Sparrow, That Stealer Of Seed, And Our Harvests Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In."
And By Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent In Their Puddles, The Air Barren Of Song As The Clouds Drifted Away. For Killing Their Greatest Enemy, The Locusts Noisily Thanked Us And Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole.
Millions Starved And We Became Skinnier And Skinnier, While Our Leaders Became Fatter And Fatter.
Finally, As That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That True Enemy Was The Voice Of Blind Idolatry; And Only Then Did We Begin To Think For Ourselves.
- Red Sparowes, "Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun"
“Despite having no lyrics, the album (by way of its song titles) follows the story of the Great Leap Forward in Mao Zedong-era China, more specifically recounting the Great Sparrow Campaign, a mass killing of sparrows (along with rats, flies and mosquitoes) that fed on a portion of the harvest and were seen as pests.” [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Red_Heart_Shines_Towar...
Alaska actually had a bald eagle bounty, as the hunters and fishermen didn't want competition: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=baldeagle.printer...
These mosquitoes do some pollination but given that they're invasive it probably wouldn't be a big deal to wipe them out.
Also, invasiveness is true of a lot of pests in North America: the American cockroach isn't American, it's from Africa. Brown rats, red/fire ants, and wild pigs are also imported/invasive.
yeah, a super-villain trying to wipe out malaria - what is his cunning plan?
Mao died in 1976. Sparrows still remain extinct in most of China.
Spoiler alert. We lose fish. All fresh water fish. Not as bad as fucking with bees. But a close second.
I did a search but no real info, the searches I found only talked about native vs imported. Not species that only exist in China.
It's a nice sentiment but I have a gut feeling that these kinds of frameworks - where blame is taken away from people and attributed to abstract concepts - lead to worse outcomes long-term. Is that gut feeling just my evolutionary instincts talking or is it a sign of something useful?
"It's systemic" isn't a stopping point for an investigation. If you diagnose something as systemic it tells you something about how you're gonna have to fight it, but nothing really about blame. E.g. if you talk about the effects of systemic racism in the US the blame isn't abstract, you can clearly trace back many policies, biases, and differences to active, individual racism over centuries.
>worse outcomes long-term
Contrary hot take. PRC post WW2 traded lives for progress was net good for long-term outcomes. Mao was bad statesman for right goals, he was excessive and did the hard things sometimes poorly, but it was important to do them none the less. The great leap forward killed millions, but ensured PRC also had the highest industrial capacity amongst developing peers after. Cultural revolution broke traditional social structures = 90%+ unified polity, speaking one language. Purging intelligentsia also overkill, but still had STEM priorities right, both nukes + first satellite developed in this era. In aggregate, disruptions setup/enabled PRC to exploit mass modernization efforts, established industrial base, and plenty of fungible bodies within a few generations instead of century+. Add oil on cramming developement atrocities to develop. Incidentally this is why pluralism of India and old practices (caste) etc is holding up development, India systemically couldn't destroy to renew, now it’s dragged down by the baggage causing 100s of millions of avoidable deaths and even more bodies with stunted development - a few decades of prolonged developing world infant mortality and food insecurity adds up. Treating human capital as actual capital is not nice, but it's effective.
Hard to say if this was actually his thinking at the time, but he's also known for declaring: "I’m not afraid of nuclear war ... China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left."
> Contrary hot take. PRC post WW2 traded lives for progress was net good for long-term outcomes.
"You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette."
"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."
"By all means necessary."
"The ends justify the means."
Disgusting.
Yes, but effective. Manifest some destiny. Future generations reap reward. All of sudden it's 5% bad and 95% good. Maybe 10% bad and 90% good during periods of introspection. The sins of founding father(s) are easy to cleanse.
Agenda driven Mao books don't highlight how Great Leap Foreward and Cultural Revolution both indispensible net good for PRC state building by actual relevant metrics. In 1980s Worldbank summary of PRC progress from post WW2 to 1970s (significantly overlapping Mao's reign) concluded relative to low-income peers PRC was significantly more industrialized - national production share 35/40/25 in agriculture/industry/services vs 40/25/40 average in low income bracket. 40 industrial share around middle income levels, supported via higher per capita energy consumption i.e. 3x India). State provided services were also assessed to be far more effective in meeting basic needs vs low income counterparts, with life expectancy in mid ~65 vs 50 for low income. PRC's 65, was again high end of middle income despite being PRC growing from low income. That's +10 bonus years x 900M lives. WB remark was "outstandingly high" and PRC's "most remarkable achievement during the past three decades". Meanwhile Mao bios: he slept with teens, GLF, CR bad. Mao trading lives in the 50s to front load industrialization/workforce development, and then drag masses into modernity by beating out the 4 olds was excessively executed, but not wrong. Right enough that it's better to be overzealous than conservative/not at all. Again, see India. The ledger on Mao doing net good is pretty clear to me - significantly more good than most other leaders who nation build in other low income countries fraction the size of PRC with better starting and operating conditions. Maybe Mao's an unrepentant psychopath, but nobel prizes have given to people whose done less.
IMO Mao is "successful" BECAUSE he's a psychopath. Like he's not a great statesmen - a great statesment would still want to industrialize and normalize culture like Mao, but they'd opt for the peaceful, 50+ year marathon. It takes a psychopath to think, naw, we'll sprint it in half and deal with the bodies. And use that psychopath energy to new regime in line to execute vision. Utlimately, it worked out, and ironically why he's bad statesmen = great founder.
>So what you’re saying is, India is badly in need of a cultural revolution?
Maybe 50/60 years ago post partition. But too late now, IMO India system finally built up some momentum + favourable external conditions while starting very precarious transition period. IN trending towards 1.7B medium term with weaker state capacity than PRC dealing with 2/3 that amount. 1/3 of PRC household still medium income developing poor. Worst thing they can do is try massive restructuring that reduces state capacity further, they're best course is to be doomed to continue muddle along which at India scale might still mean great things for fraction of population. Unfortunately, my guess is that means 40%+ of workforce trapped in subsistence farming and weak female labour participation bordering on repressive Islamic country level. Too much people = demographic curse, India likely not going to maintain growth to keep up with even new (male) job demand, will get old before rich, basically the worst case scenario for PRC demographers that slammed through family planning / one child policy. On the other hand 1/3 of India doing well + geography makes her a formidable power.
E: One useful socially disruptive thing India can do is massively incentivize inter cast marriages to demolish cast within a couple generations. Basically open limited pool of tier1 / high income opportunities to more candidates and select for the best. Also prevent brain drain.
Deng Xiaoping regeared the nation apparatus toward a non-antagonistic way in the "hide your strenght, bide your time fashion", kicking the economic boom.
Obviously the chinese top-down approach is showing its shortcomings with the impendent economic & demographic collapse.
India is already at a sustainable demographics growth, only its (muslim) minorities are prospected to grow at unsustainable rates
>PRC collapse
Still top performing economy in it's class, enviable growth in real terms while moving up value chain. Meanwhile US labels PRC most serious systemtic competitor with capability to displace, while pouring inordinate resourses and adopting PRC style industrial/tech policies to compete. That suggest it's showing it's strength more than ever. Imitation most sincere form of flattery
>demographic collapse ... >India
PRC is in process of exploiting THE greatest high skilled demographic divident in human history. The kind of divident actually involved in building advanced power. Like of all areas CCP top down approach is showing it's strength, it's demographic planning. Reduced birth rate higher than expected but the TLDR is PRC demographers did rub their 2 brain cells together when projecting family planning in 50 years ago and right now PRC is in roughly on course in terms of predicted development phase -> fear get too old before getting rich with too much people, limit births, peasant parents have mobility to work in factories, concentrate wealth to educate/upskill 1-2 kids, educated generation move up value chain.
India is not at sustainable demographic growth. India is trending toward basically the NIGHTMARE scenario that made PRC implement family planning in the first place. PRC system with much more state capacity than India wanted less people because it knew uplifting 1B+ was going to be monumental / impossible task. PRC still dealing with 500M (skew old and resigned) people that got left behind with 5x GDP per capita, with high savings and home ownership rate. India is going to end up twice+ as much unproductive workforce (skew young and rebellious) with fraction of state resources/power to support. Demographics is more than pyramid and TFR. Like the only benefit of Indian population is they're vegetarian (because that's what prolonged poverty ingrains in culture) which is good for food security.
https://chineseposters.net/themes/four-pests
https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/pc-19...
Some insects crawl before they fly. and some even fly before they crawl I imagine.
Pollinating Orchards By Hand | Lessons From Sichuan, China - https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by...
The sparrows were just a sideshow to distract from the famines cause.
Most famines were caused by the culture of face and the nature of the party. The party dictated a plan, and as failing the plan and making the great leader loose face, ment the local governments loosing face would get them Maos wrath, all the members of the party reported success when it came to harvests.
So Mao collected the surplus and sold it to the soviet union, who he with his inferiority complex wanted to impress. After that, starvation raged, and he knew. They all know, but feign to not know, to keep face. Instead, superficial measures are taken.
Like hunting scapegoats, spreading crude conspiracy theories inside the country, or hunting harmless sparrows. Busy work to detract from the actual cause. And nothing was learned from this, cultural change was avoided and now its time to go full circle.
Same today, building more coal plants, while half of the country in the south is sliding towards a wet-bulb scenario. 400 Mio living in an area, that could become uninhabitable within a human lifetime, and the plan for that? Get rich faster and run, fuck the peasants, obviously.
The chinese deserve some better government of there own choice with some longterm planning, that poured the money into actual working science, to solve the problems they got. But for that this face nonsense has to vanish first.
I don't think they disagree with the goal and intent of rapidly industrializing China from peasant-based into urban workers. They will still uphold Mao's legacy even if they disagreed with his excesses and failures. They are about economic development because it is a required stage for their goal of achieving socialism and communism. Economic development is their longterm planning and "working science."
Mao did change Chinese culture, but it was by purging Western-style intellectuals and promoting mass organization to take command from the bottom-up, because he saw people on the ground being more correct than intellectuals who might not apply their learning to the actual conditions.
The successors after Mao adopting Deng Xiaoping's liberal attitudes towards economic development can be seen as a Party rebuke of Mao's policies. Yet they will still uphold Mao's legacy.
Make me think of the climate change orthodoxy were we focus solely on co2 and forget about all the other human problems.
If we'd actually focused on co2, rather than the less than minimum effort made so far, then maybe there'd be more space for the other problems. Instead this one problem looms larger and larger.
Tesla Master plan 3 highlight the step needed to fully transition
Bjorn Longburgh explain in his book and interview what are the different priorities and costs associated with the different way we can do good in the world.
I am super into renewable, but climate change will not be a problem at the current speed of innovation. We should focus on making the poor richer so they then can care about the environment. We should also tell young people to have kids, that there is not too many people on the planet and we should be way more careful with the risks of nuclear war.
Not too long ago we were afraid of widespread famine in the 2000 and the return of Ice age, and probably many others thing.
The advantage is that you have period were you have free energy if a business find a way to use it. He think that as that become common more more business will find ways to take advantage of it: H2 generation, heat storage, steel/ciment, and other things we are yet to find.
I came to the same conclusion when I installed solar on my motorhome, it’s was way more effective to install "too much" solar so that I have enough for the night of a gray and cold winter day. Otherwise I would had to pay 10X more in lithium batteries. In a summer sunny day I use a fraction of the power. hopefully with a large grid and many free agent and an efficient market the free energy will find uses.
Edit: I deserve to have been downvoted, I have misinterpreted the context of "right" in the parent post and they have educated me with articles in turn
The only bit about hintymad's claim that's false is that the people who publicly doubted Mao weren't labelled as things. They were just executed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_offences_in_China
Yup, Chinese did use "bourgeoisie" too. It's called Xiaozi （小资）, though the connotation of the word today has drastically changed. Before and during the Culture Revolution, the word referred to those who didn't have complete conviction in the Revolution and were attracted to the "corrupted life style" of the western world. However, bourgeoisies were educable. If they refused the education, whatever that means, they would turn into the right.
Just do the Google search on the terms.
The whole point of the comment is that truth matters and freedom of speech matters and government or any entity alone can’t be the arbiter of information
This is a really optimistic point of view
It's an open question how much of the Americas were actually heavily forested before western disease killed 95% of the population.
A lot of what Europeans saw when they explored was basically post-apocalyptic wilderness which had sprung up in the 100-200 years since the vast majority of the population was killed.
And as a consequence of this policy, how many new coal power plants has china opened?
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-....
How many fewer coal plants were opened than would have been opened without that policy?
If the People are not presently experiencing a material shortage, then they do not rely on authority figures to go about the daily business of feeding and policing themselves. Without regular contact between the People and the central authority personnel, it becomes impossible for the central authority personnel to supervise and grant/revoke permissions for them. Supervision and permission were the two components absolutely required for the government of the USSR to continue to exist--supervision allows for the early identification of threats to the government structure, and "permission" systems create excuses for the government to deploy the violent martial caste against threats to their supremacy.
(It is self-evident that people don't like living inside systems where they're constantly monitored and supervised; millions of people around the world work very hard to leave supervision-heavy countries for less-supervised ones. Also, children everywhere chafe against school, and prisoners chafe against prison.)
So I don't believe a truly centrally-planned, communist government will ever generate a useful material surplus (food, medicine, tools, etc.). If it did, the People who enjoyed the results of the surplus would immediately stop participating in the centrally planned processes mandated upon them by the planning committees.
Conversely, the first thing any centrally-planned government will do is organize itself in such a way that all important goods become scarce, so that it can guarantee regular contact points with citizens and set up a robust system of permission granting and revocation.
Fun side note: I really love The Culture sci-fi series by Iain M. Banks, for it's depiction of a truely utopian, classless, centrally planned Galactic Empire. As it turns out, this is the ideal form of human social organization provided that the central planning is done almost exclusively by post-singularity benevolent AI ( who are essentially gods). This is about the only scenario where central planning seems viable.
one nitwit, megalomaniac communist dictator decides to kill them all off across a vast country he rules by terror - stupid, and a disaster
In a more decentralized setup, it is bottom-up, and suddenly "hey this isn't working" gets propagated. Also, a peer is more willing to call you on your bullshit, but if you're a dictator, you just get yes-men.
Essentially, the setup was such that anyone less than a perfectly informed leader who never made mistakes would wreak havoc.
- The USSR sometimes overproduced cigarettes, so ran ad campaigns to convince people to start smoking.
- The Holomodor, in which Ukraine was starved by exporting (stealing) all its grain, including the grain needed to plant next season's harvest, and when starving peasants tried to flee they were then banned from leaving.
- In modern China, ghost cities full of buildings nobody is living in.
- Stalin's mass execution of basically everyone who mattered in Soviet society, including virtually all of his military and intelligence leaders, which put the USSR into such a weakened state that Hitler is on record as saying now is the time to strike because the Soviets will never be so weak again.
- The single-minded obsession with steel production.
- In NK the government maintains a list of approved hair cuts. There are 28 approved styles and anyone with a haircut that's not on the list will be punished. Additionally, punishment for crimes are often levelled against the families of the criminals.
It's inevitable that these sorts of things happen because the goals of communism are deeply unnatural (e.g. banning markets, central planning) and can therefore only be implemented through totalitarian power, which lacks sufficient bandwidth and flexibility to incorporate feedback loops. So everything goes off the rails because the people making decisions are blinded to the outcomes.
On the flip side, there may not be anything to inherently prevent capitalism from doing similar things too. The USSR tried to have a much more planned and state managed version of capitalism to progress through the stages of socialism. The central planners decided where profits went instead of private property holders. If these property holders were to have control of a political system, then there is the potential they could enforce similar things.
We can try this framing in another 100 yr drought scenario and see what gets blamed.
"So the ideas of capitalism is what caused the Dust Bowl or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role grass/trees played when creating vast plots of dry overplowed land"
Look I'm no great lover of communism, I sat through the same U.S. history classes in the 80's-90's, saw the wall fall on TV, etc. That said I think the one thing no one acknowledges is that people don't start revolutions and try out radical types of government because their lives are going just swell! Shit maybe its to much Civ as a kid, but I think its important to be honest about the pluses and minuses of government and the specifics of the people, region, and time period that these changes occur.
of course they don't, and i deeply sympathise. but what they always seem to end up with like genocidal maniacs like mao and stalin. both communists. and of course, in the west, we had hitler. but after 1945 i would say human life has improved in the west - more than i can say for china (despite industrialisation) and the "former" ussr.
i should say i am someone of broadly left-wing leanings.
no, they were caused by ideological stupidity (stalin: look up "kulaks", mao: see cultural revolution and great leap forward), and both states being governed, by terror, by paranoid megalomaniacs. read a history book.
> this was an issue with the USSR and early China.
did the west not provide the ussr and china with enourmous amounts of military, economic and technical aid during and after ww2 (selling the ussr jet engines, for example)? oh, yes, it did!
---
I wouldn't lean on wartime subsidies too much because they are extraordinary circumstances. The USSR focused on self-sufficiency to the point of foreign trade only being 4% of GDP in 1985. China started opening up after Nixon normalized relations.
See also: Frogs and Rabbits in Australia, Deer in Haida Gwaii, Mongooses in Hawaii, the list goes on and on...
But at the core the problem was blindly following the suggestion of a leader who is not making evidence based decisions. This will always end in tragedy.
I regret to report that such leaders can and do emerge under every economic system.
Maybe free markets are less susceptible to them because the leaders have less power over people’s lives in free markets.
Perhaps the takeaway should Be to limit the power our leaders have over us because the world is complex and a central plan will never encompass the realities of every individual.
For instance, consider the claim that China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the USSR. Where does it come from? This article seems to be a mash-up of a few sources, mainly Wikipedia. Indeed Wikipedia has the same claim, which is sourced from the book "Mao: The Real Story", by Alexander Pantsov. The said book has just a single sentence about this: "As a result, the Chinese even had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union." A vague assertion: no source, no date, no number of birds. Searching the web only showed many deformations of this (imported from Russia (sic), or USSR and Canada, or imported a million sparrows...). I couldn't find more about this in JSTOR and SciHub.
Overall, I haven't see anything compelling about this detail (importing sparrows) and not much about the main claim (killing sparrows is the main cause of the famine).
One last thought: pesticides have killed scores of birds and insects, especially in the USA. Probably much more than the Four Pests Campaign did. And ecological imbalances have obviously suffered during the last decades: among others, bees are waning in many countries. It seems a bit hypocritical to blame Mao in the past and forget Monsanto-Bayer and Co in the present.
Google Translate says the USSR sent wagonfuls of sparrows. Btw Mr. Smartypants, no need for your "(sic)" "Russia" is allowed too, it'd be like a country asking the EU for help and Germany responding, Russia was a country which was part of the USSR.
The Russian article references papers written by Chinese and Russian scholars, I find it peculiar that you're wary of Western propaganda but yet rely on just English-language sources...