The Four Pests Campaign

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing! This would make an excellent cross-curricular lesson for a science teacher studying the environment. What is great about this article is that it also offers a clip from the newspaper at the time of the event. Students can read a secondary source written at the time to understand the feelings and reporting of the event as it was happening. It would also be great to start the students off by reading the newspaper clip and then asking them what the positive or negative consequences of this event would be. Students can then predict some of the events that took place during The Four Pests Campaign. This is also a great way for students to interpret the way an event is presented. Mao encouraged everybody to kill the sparrows and all citizens were on board and enthusiastic, but in the end they did more harm. This can show how perspectives change over time.

[Anonymous]

Wow, thank you so much for sharing this resource. I hadn't heard about this at all until now, and this is definitely a really fascinating article/ story that can be applied to many content areas. I teach US history, but I can foresee myself using excerpts from this article/ a summary of the event in order to teach my students about the ways that government actions can have unforseen effects. Also, I think it's a great way to show students about governments that take on actions that go beyond what a government should do. Also, it can be used to teach students about how governments use citizens/ convince them to act in certain ways. If I taught science, I would definitely be excited to use this resource to teach students about different ways that ecosystems operate and interact with one another to stay in balance. Really a great resource.

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

This is a fascinating article about China's Four Pests Campaign and the after-math. In 1958, China ordered the extermination of several "pests" (including sparrows) in an ill-fated campaign that eventually led to catastrophe. Chinese scientists had calculated that each sparrow consumed 4.5kg of grain each year — and that for every million sparrows killed, there would be food for 60,000 people. Armed with this information, Mao launched the Great Sparrow Campaign.

To accomplish this task, Chinese citizens were mobilized in massive numbers to eradicate the birds by forcing them to fly until they fell from exhaustion. The Chinese people took to the streets clanging their pots and pans or beating drums to terrorize the birds and prevent them from landing. Nests were torn down, eggs were broken, chicks killed, and sparrows shot down from the sky. Experts estimate that hundreds of millions of sparrows were killed as part of the campaign.
As a result of these efforts, the sparrow became nearly extinct in China.
And that's when the problems started. Without the sparrows to curb the insect population, the crops were getting decimated in a way far worse than if birds had been allowed to hang around. Things got so bad that the Chinese government started importing sparrows from the Soviet Union. The overflow of insects, plus the added effects of widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides, were a significant contributor to the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) in which an estimated 30 million people died of starvation.
The episode serves as a stark lesson for what can happen when sweeping changes are made to an ecosystem. Yet, in a startlingly similar campaign initiated back in 2004, China culled thousands of civet cats in an effort to eradicate SARS. The over-arching lesson, it would seem, may not have be learned.
Here's the full article if anyone wants to check it out:

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5927112/chinas-worst-self-inflicted-disaster-the-campaign-to-wipe-out-the-common-sparrow

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