Any living organism can’t avoid crises since they are a normal part
of life. However, none have ever encountered a disaster on the level of
that which fell upon the Chinese Sparrows in 1958. The
environmental crisis in question was not a natural one
rather, it was manmade. In the entire history of
sparrows around the world, they have never been
hunted down as they were in China in 1958.
A radical campaign to rapidly increase China’s
industrial output by mobilizing the country’s vast rural
peasantry took place at this time. It was set in motion fig-9: Sparrow in danger
fig-10: Sparrow campaign
by the government with the intention to achieve rapid increase
in industrial production that China would catch up with the rest of the
civilized world. China had an agrarain spociety then.
One of the most famous initiatives then was to form co-operatives
or collectives up to 5,000 families and this initially yielded double the
amount of crops grown. This initial success led to ambitious goals for
the following year, but the weather didn’t cooperate. Even though fewer
crops were harvested, rural officials overstated the
amount of grain for fear of not meeting their
quotas. This over-reporting led to an imbalance
between the demand and the supply. The sparrows
were accused of pecking away at the supplies in
warehouses at an officially estimated rate of four
pounds of grain per sparrow per year. In the cities
and the outskirts, almost half of the labour force
was mobilized into the anti-sparrow army.
People started trapping, poisoning and killing sparrows in large
numbers. Several free-fire zones were set up for shooting the sparrows.
People would beat drums to scare the birds from landing, so the
sparrows were forced to keep flying until they dropped dead from fatigue.
Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs were broken, and nestlings were
killed. Non-material rewards and recognition were offered to schools,
work units and government agencies in accordance with the number of
sparrows killed.
Later some scientists who cut open the digestive systems of dead
sparrows found that three-fourth of the contents were of insects harmful
for crops and only one-fourth contained grains. The scientific findings
