Four Pests Campaign Of China – Free PDF Download

The Four Pests Campaign 1958

• The 4 pests campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forwardin China from 1958 to 1962.
• Mao Zedong’s spectacular plan to rid China of diseases.
• The campaign caused widespread famine, economic ruin, environmental changes.

Background

• After decades of civil war, world war and revolution, People’s Republic of China PRC was established in 1949.
• In the 1950s PRC was eager to create the communist utopia Mao had promised.
• Among the many Five Year Plans and campaigns undertaken to achieve that goal was the spectacular failure known as the Four Pests Campaign.
• The Great Leap forward (1958-1962)
• The Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) was an economic and social campaign led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1962.
• Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people’s communes.
• Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside.

Pests targeted

• The four pests to be eliminated were

1. Rats
2. Flies
3. Mosquitoes
4. Sparrows

Diseases ravaged China for centuries

• Bubonic Plague
• Cholera
• Schistosomiasis
• Tuberculosis
• Small pox
• Malaria
• Dengue

Eliminate Sparrows Campaign

• Why birds?
• They ate grains, seeds and fruits cultivated with hard work by farmers
• Since these were the easiest to kill, a large number of people started hunting them in groups
• Local competitions for most kills!

• 1 billion sparrows, 1.5 billion rats, 100 million kilograms of flies and 11 million kilograms of mosquitoes were outright decimated
• The sparrow’s intrinsic role in the ecological balance was unrealized and resulted in an unmitigated, well-orchestrated environmental disaster

• Locusts and other small insects went unchecked and their large numbers devoured fields of grain.
• In 1960, Mao Zedong ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs

The Great Famine 1959 – 1962

• The Great Chinese Famine is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation ranges in the tens of millions
• Death toll
• 5 crore – official
• 3 – 4.5 crore – Independent historians

Impact

• The “Four Pests” campaign was successful in achieving its primary goal of vermin eradication.
• But one of the most successful public health campaigns in history came at an extraordinarily grave cost for the Chinese, ecologically and demographically.
• Tamper with the unseen balancing beam of predators and prey – nature will create a level playing field at humans’ expense.

Link to COVID 19

• After two decades of severe economic distress, including famine and food shortages, in the late 1970s, China embarked on an unusual agricultural experiment of wildlife farming.
• The state had little money to invest in scaling up livestock production.
• Instead, farmers were encouraged to collect wild animals—rats, civets, snakes, bats and others—and breed them for home consumption and commercial markets.

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