WAR ON SPARROWS !

Australian Galleries, 28 Derby St. Collingwood May 30 – June 17

The Four Pests campaign was one of the first programs of the The Great Leap Forward under chairman Mao from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rodents, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is all so known as the Smash Sparrows Now Campaign! or the Eliminate Sparrows Now Campaign! The war on sparrows resulted in severe ecological imbalance and is regarded as being one of the causes of the following Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, the campaign against sparrows was ended and redirected to bed bugs.
Sparrows were accused of stealing approximately 2 kg (4 pounds) of grain per sparrow per year. Sparrow nests were smashed, eggs were smashed, and chicks were killed. Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, their goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion worked. The ground was littered with dead and disabled birds. During the officially prescribed times of official noise making the sky was full of falling birds – making umbrellas essential for protection. The umbrellas where able to break the bird’s otherwise fatal
fall to the ground but meant that the surviving sparrows had to spend the rest of their lives with some
part of their body trapped in an umberella.

Some sparrows sort refuge in foreign embassies. The staff at the Polish embassy refused to let people come into the embassy to scare away and kill the sparrows who were hiding there and as a result the embassy was surrounded by people with drums, pots and pans. After two days of constant drumming, whistling and some shooting, the Poles had to use shovels to clear the embassy of dead birds. Prominent ornithologist Tso-sin Cheng pointed out that sparrows ate a large number of the insects that ate the crops, so in fact sparrows saved more grain than they “stole “. By April of 1960 The War On Sparrows was
ended by the party (not Mao ).