This incident dates back to 1958 when Mao Zedong, the leader of the People's Republic of China, was looking for ways to improve the lives of the people of China. During that time the UK economy was at the top, due to which Mao Zedong also wanted to take China's economy to a higher level. In fact, the country was facing an economic crisis since 1950, and to overcome this, Zedong made a Great Leap Forward plan, which had many parts.
One of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward was the "Four Pests Campaign", under which Mao Zedong decided to eliminate or kill rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Hence, he ordered the people to go forth and kill all the sparrows. According to the leader, this was a kind of hygiene campaign, from which both people's lives and food grains were to be saved. Rats, which spread the plague, mosquitoes that spread malaria, and flies that spread cholera were followed by sparrows. Mao believed that sparrow birds eat a lot of grain seeds, which was causing a lot of damage. Therefore, the flies, mosquitoes, and rats were being killed so that they would not spread any disease, and sparrows were killed so that they would not eat grain seeds and fruits.
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Flies, mosquitoes, and rats were adept at hiding, but the sparrows had their limits, resulting in where they were seen sitting, the people would run towards them. People kept chasing the sparrows for so long until the birds got so tired that they fell out of the sky. To ensure that sparrows died, their nests were searched and their eggs were broken, and even baby sparrows were thrown to the ground. Along with the elders, children also happily became a part of the mass killing of sparrows. One of the reasons behind this was that Zedong had kept a reward for killing the sparrows, as whoever kills more sparrows, is rewarded accordingly. The result was that everyone started killing these creatures excessively, reducing the number of sparrows in China to zero in the next two years. During this whole Campaign, hundreds of millions of sparrows were killed.
Mao was very happy to see that he had succeeded in his campaign, but he did not know that this mistake was going to destroy the life of China. Due to the death of all the sparrows, the number of insects started increasing in large numbers. Because sparrows didn't only eat grain seeds but also ate insects. As a result, the insects population grew rapidly as there were no birds to control them and they started destroying the crops in huge amounts. Later on, the crops even stopped growing there, resulting in a famine-like condition raised in China, and this starvation had emerged at such a large scale, which caused 45 million people to die. After this incident, everyone there understood how disastrous the consequences of playing with nature can be.
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