However, sometimes I do write about other things. I was fascinated earlier in the year by a slice of Chinese history. I won't go into it in detail here, but I was reading a lot about the Great Leap Forward and the Four Pests Campaign initiated by Mao Zedong. The idea was that there were four key pests who ate the grain that the Chinese labourers worked hard to farm and harvest - flies, mosquitos, rats and sparrows - and that by eradicating these, the nation would be better off. Unfortunately the plan kinda backfired, as by killing the majority of the sparrow population, the insects that they fed upon, including locusts, went through a huge population explosion, leading to a terrible ecological imbalance. This in turn contributed to the Great Chinese Famine in which 30 million people died.
Everyone, Come and Fight Sparrows
They are the enemy, picking at the grain.
The grain so scarce,
Our population so great.
We are at war, everyone, come and fight.
The boys with their stones
And slingshots, popping and snapping
Knocking them spinning down,
And men with their guns,
Decimating, the feathers falling.
Out in the streets
We bang pots and pans,
We hammer on drums,
And the birds circle in the sky,
Stranded.
Too scared to land
Until they fall, exhausted,
To the ground.
And we have won.
Tear down their nests.
Climb trees and take eggs.
Smash them, grab the nestlings
And crush them.
Be a good soldier
In this war against pests.
There will be rewards for those
Who kill the most;
Awards and recognition.
And we have won.
The evil dirt brown birds
Driven close to extinction.
The grain safe from their
Greedy, snapping beaks.
They are gone.
Out in the streets
We celebrate.
We bang on our drums and
No more birds circle in the sky.
Now locusts swarm our land.
The food of the birds
Now uncontrolled.
Their population so great.
Our harvest has been exceptional,
Tell them that in the cities.
Our campaign was a success.
We have won.
We fought the sparrows,
We were the victors.
But the farmers were taken
To work in the cities
And the locusts have eaten our crops.
They are they enemy, devouring our grain.
The grain so plentiful.
Yet no one to harvest it.
Our ally, the sparrows,
Are gone.
The cities take the grain
That we have managed to save
And ship it to Africa, to Cuba,
While we starve in our villages
Out in the hills.
Away from the public eye.
The propaganda sells our success
Because we have won.
More locusts, then more,
An explosion of population so great.
We poison and spread our pesticides
And hear the earth sigh
As thirty million die.
Our pots and pans empty
Have we won?
