A Great Passage

This is a great passage from a recent New Yorker review of new books on Mao Zedong. It’s a little sad but also a little humorous in an absurd kind of way. It’s obviously has a moral to it, but I thought I would just post it because it’s fascinating. (The whole article is good [and not behind a paywall] as well).

Having mobilized the masses [during the Great Leap Forward years], Mao continually searched for things for them to do. At one point, he declared war on four common pests: flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows. The Chinese were exhorted to bang drums, pots, pans, and gongs in order to keep sparrows flying until, exhausted, they fell to earth. Provincial recordkeepers chalked up impressive body counts: Shanghai alone accounted for 48,695.49 kilograms of flies, 930,486 rats, 1,213.05 kilograms of cockroaches, and 1,367,440 sparrows. Mao’s Marx-tinted Faustianism demonized nature as man’s adversary. But, Dikötter points out, “Mao lost his war against nature. The campaign backfired by breaking the delicate balance between humans and the environment.” Liberated from their usual nemeses, locusts and grasshoppers devoured millions of tons of food even as people starved to death.

(My Chinese isn’t good enough to read that poster, but I guess it says “Everybody come and fight the sparrows.”)