“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow”, muses Hamlet before going on to reflect on the inevitability of death. These words would have had not just a figurative but a literal significance in the China of the late 1950s when the country’s leader Mao Tse Tung chose sparrows for the first assault of the “War of the Four Pests” – an ambitious nationwide campaign to rid the country of creatures deemed responsible for spreading disease and damaging agricultural output (rats, flies and mosquitos were the other victims).
Mao’s attempt to control nature was one of the most absurd and catastrophic political policy initiatives in human history. There were to be an awful lot of fallen sparrows and an awful lot of quite avoidable death before it was over.
The birds were targeted first, perhaps because they were regarded as “agents of capitalism” (your guess is as good as mine). The “smash the sparrows” campaign involved the citizenry being ordered to bang pots and pans to scare the birds and prevent them landing. When they fell exhausted from the sky, they were finished off, scooped up and handed in to the authorities for a reward.
However, it soon became apparent that, to put it mildly, the plan hadn’t really been thought through. With fewer birds around, insects flourished and feasted on the crops with impunity. As a result, yields began to fall alarmingly.
Rather than acknowledge this failure the authorities hid the news, fiddled the statistics, and carried on regardless. Only after two long hard years, was the campaign finally halted; or rather redirected, with bed bugs the new target. It was by then too late, and with locusts flying rampant there was little that could be done to save the crops.
It has been estimated that up to 45 million lives were lost in The Great Chinese Famine.
Does any of this sound familiar? Well, OK, comparisons between the leaders of today’s locked down countries with a sadistic tyrant like Mao Tse Tung may be somewhat over the top, but there are nonetheless disturbing parallels between a tale of dubious science, unchecked authority, bureaucratic group think, and, well … Mao’s “War of the Four Pests”.
Firstly, to be fair (if we must be so), Mao’s initiative was a response to a genuine problem, and arguably three of the four pests were worth targeting. However, just as with today’s response to Covid-19, little or no thought was given to the potential consequences of extreme, untried methods on society as a whole. To use the modern parlance, no impact assessment was made of the wider consequences of a narrowly focused campaign.
Secondly, unchecked authority: no, we are not quite living in a totalitarian state, but there are troubling echoes. Along with the government’s dubiously self-gifted emergency powers, and the surrender of the official opposition, there have been alarming signs of the repression of dissenting voices. We have had the temporary shadow banning of the Great Barrington Declaration, social media’s blocking of inconvenient scientific reports, Facebook’s censorship of Carl Heneghan’s report on the Danish facemask study, and the call for anti-vaccination content to be outlawed.
One could go on…
Thirdly, there is the messaging, which in Mao’s campaign featured hyperbolic language and dubiously compiled statistics relentlessly pushed at a bewildered public. As Frank Dikotter puts it in his chronicle of Chinese history, Mao’s methods in the “war” employed “rhetorical inflation, combined with specious precision to produce digits as surreal as the campaign itself”. Once again, does this sound familiar?
Some of it is eerily familiar: such as the tripartite slogans “Smash the sparrows”, “Serve the people”, which are in tone at least much like today’s “Save the NHS”, “Hands, Face, Space”, “Don’t kill Granny”. There’s a Mao-ist whiff about all of it.
The more you look, the more creepy parallels you find. We have our snitcher’s hotline, while Mao employed a network of agents to ferret out counter-revolutionaries (or sparrow sympathisers!). There are the excessive punishments for the wrongdoers/thinkers – prison terms/the death penalty in the case of Maoist China; exorbitant fines and career jeopardy in the UK.
Then there is the banging of pots and pans, a gesture with a different purpose perhaps, but it is the same kind of performative group activity designed to instill a sense of shared endeavor and a common officially-sanctioned, mandated viewpoint, all while discouraging dissent or critical thinking.
One difference between the war on the sparrows and the war on coronavirus is that the former took place in China only. No one was tempted to emulate Mao on this one. Well, almost no one: Kim Il-sung, the contemporary leader of communist North Korea, was influenced to a degree, and drew up a “3-Year Plan for Punishing Sparrows”, but ultimately decided to wait and see how things turned out in China first.
He did wait, saw what happened, and chose to leave the sparrows unpunished.
There’s a lesson there too, surely?
As an interesting postscript and supplementary parallel perhaps, despite the “War of the Four Pests” debacle Mao was undeterred and, as he was in total control of the media, largely unscathed. Keen to move forward with his other big idea, he turned his thoughts to a massive overhaul of industry – “The Great Leap Forward” in steel production.
Originally, China was declared to be on course to overtake the UK in 15 years, but Mao decided to abbreviate that to 3. It was to be another catastrophe based on poor quality science, wishful thinking and impossible to achieve targets.
Boris’s Green Industrial Revolution anyone?
