11 ms·

Killing sparrows led to famines in China

106 points by aashutoshrathi 4y ago

bryanlarsen 4y ago
I didn't realize sparrows ate insects too. The rule of thumb on the farm was "swallows good, sparrows bad". Swallows ate insects and sparrows ate grain. Maybe China could have replaced sparrows with swallows but that would probably have led to a different kind of disaster since importing species has a horrible track record.
- yareally 4y ago
  Swallows will only eat flying insects and catch them in the air. The common house sparrow typically forges on the ground. The intersection of the insects both species eat is probably close to zero
  - Teever 4y ago
    They may eat the same insects but at different phases of their life cycle. Some insects crawl before they fly. and some even fly before they crawl I imagine.
dduugg 4y ago
The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like A Mighty Storm, Suddenly And Furiously Blinding Our Senses. We Stood Transfixed In Blank Devotion As Our Leader Spoke To Us, Looking Down On Our Mute Faces With A Great, Raging, And Unseeing Eye. Like The Howling Glory Of The Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous And The Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts And Clutching Our Innocent Awe. A Message Of Avarice Rained Down And Carried Us Away Into False Dreams Of Endless Riches. "Annihilate The Sparrow, That Stealer Of Seed, And Our Harvests Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In." And By Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent In Their Puddles, The Air Barren Of Song As The Clouds Drifted Away. For Killing Their Greatest Enemy, The Locusts Noisily Thanked Us And Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole. Millions Starved And We Became Skinnier And Skinnier, While Our Leaders Became Fatter And Fatter. Finally, As That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That True Enemy Was The Voice Of Blind Idolatry; And Only Then Did We Begin To Think For Ourselves. - Red Sparowes, "Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun"
- ycombinete 4y ago
  For anyone else wondering why each word in this is capitalised: “Despite having no lyrics, the album (by way of its song titles) follows the story of the Great Leap Forward in Mao Zedong-era China, more specifically recounting the Great Sparrow Campaign, a mass killing of sparrows (along with rats, flies and mosquitoes) that fed on a portion of the harvest and were seen as pests.” [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Red_Heart_Shines_Toward_the_Red_Sun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Red_Heart_Shines_Towar...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- OrbOfConfusion 4y ago
  A truly fantastic album, start to finish.
rdtsc 4y ago
> The People’s Republic of China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to stop the ecological disruption. That was surprising. I knew about the sparrows and the famine, but had no idea about them being imported later by the hundreds of thousands. > The diversion of labor from harvesting crops to steel production and construction meant crop supplies were left to rot in fields. That was often done in badly built smelters which were not able to produce quality steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace From the wikipedia article: > Mao Zedong defended backyard furnaces despite the shortcomings, claiming that the practice showed mass enthusiasm, mass creativity, and mass participation in economic development. At least with sparrows they sort of acknowledged they screwed up. But the steel furnace comment, reminded me of the local municipality, where we carefully sorted recyclables into multiple streams, which later turned out were dumped into a single landfill. Eventually, the municipality told people to stop sorting the materials, and just use the one bin, but people refused and raised complaints. The city understood their error, apologized, and reverted their decision, letting citizens perform their sorting ritual, but in the end still dumped everything into one large landfill.
jmclnx 4y ago
I wonder if any sparrow species unique to China went extinct ? I did a search but no real info, the searches I found only talked about native vs imported. Not species that only exist in China.
kevviiinn 4y ago
I find it rather strange that people tend to blame the famine on communism and central planning
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Why?
- nradov 4y ago
  Central planning usually causes shortages of everything including food. Famines are a routine occurrence under communism. https://victimsofcommunism.org/curriculum-chapter-2/ https://victimsofcommunism.org/curriculum-chapter-2/
  - quacked 4y ago
    After reading several autobiographies of people who lived in the USSR, I've started to think that material shortages are actually the deliberate goal of people who run communist countries. More succinctly, without material shortages, communist-inspired governments rapidly cease to exist. If the People are not presently experiencing a material shortage, then they do not rely on authority figures to go about the daily business of feeding and policing themselves. Without regular contact between the People and the central authority personnel, it becomes impossible for the central authority personnel to supervise and grant/revoke permissions for them. Supervision and permission were the two components absolutely required for the government of the USSR to continue to exist--supervision allows for the early identification of threats to the government structure, and "permission" systems create excuses for the government to deploy the violent martial caste against threats to their supremacy. (It is self-evident that people don't like living inside systems where they're constantly monitored and supervised; millions of people around the world work very hard to leave supervision-heavy countries for less-supervised ones. Also, children everywhere chafe against school, and prisoners chafe against prison.) So I don't believe a truly centrally-planned, communist government will ever generate a useful material surplus (food, medicine, tools, etc.). If it did, the People who enjoyed the results of the surplus would immediately stop participating in the centrally planned processes mandated upon them by the planning committees. Conversely, the first thing any centrally-planned government will do is organize itself in such a way that all important goods become scarce, so that it can guarantee regular contact points with citizens and set up a robust system of permission granting and revocation.
bluSCALE4 4y ago
This is why I was concerned when I heard Google, of all companies, released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out. I'm curious what happened with this effort. It's not exactly a vote of confidence when the other guy trying to do this is Bill Gates.
- ransom1538 4y ago
  "released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out" Spoiler alert. We lose fish. All fresh water fish. Not as bad as fucking with bees. But a close second.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    bats and birds would suffer also
- goda90 4y ago
  Generally those efforts are targeted at disease carrying mosquitoes. There are other species of mosquitoes in the same regions and there aren't any animals that only eat one kind of mosquito.
  - Brybry 4y ago
    To add to this, the disease carrying mosquito species like aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus are invasive species in the Americas. These mosquitoes do some pollination but given that they're invasive it probably wouldn't be a big deal to wipe them out. Also, invasiveness is true of a lot of pests in North America: the American cockroach isn't American, it's from Africa. Brown rats, red/fire ants, and wild pigs are also imported/invasive.
    - hidroto 4y ago
      a complication to eradicating a invasive species is when that species has replaced a native species ecological niche. getting rid of it at that point may cause more problems then it solves.
abudabi123 4y ago
How does the targetting of the sparrow species for annihilation in China compare to the post-Columbus ongoing deforestation in the Americas's? Xi does have the ecological health of the environment on his policy priority list which is a change from previous leadership driven by slavery to economic devop. There are documentaries on little birds by the sea. They have their place.
- scythe 4y ago
  Practically no other event in human history comes close to the ecological and cultural destructive impact of the early colonial period in the Americas. But because of that, it should not be used as a yardstick for anything else. "It's not the worst thing ever" is a poor defense of anything.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    On a similar note, there's a danger of comparing "the early colonial period in the Americas", a 300-400 year period containing many distinguishable catastrophes, to anything not of equal scale. It's kind of like comparing an apple and a whole apple tree.
    - scythe 4y ago
      A fair complaint, but I didn't put the comparison; the poster I responded to did.
      - andrewflnr 4y ago
        Quite. I'm extending your point, not disagreeing. :)
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    > Practically no other event in human history comes close to the ecological and cultural destructive impact of the early colonial period in the Americas. This is a really optimistic point of view
- 4y ago
alfor 4y ago
Another example of the peril of central planning and total authority. Make me think of the climate change orthodoxy were we focus solely on co2 and forget about all the other human problems.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  Not really. Climate change is a multiplier or interwoven with lot of those other problems. Plus burning fossil fuels is so central to our economies that we haven't even stopped co2 emissions rising. If we'd actually focused on co2, rather than the less than minimum effort made so far, then maybe there'd be more space for the other problems. Instead this one problem looms larger and larger.
  - alfor 4y ago
    Look into the work of Tony Seba: renewable are on an exponential growth. Tesla Master plan 3 highlight the step needed to fully transition Bjorn Longburgh explain in his book and interview what are the different priorities and costs associated with the different way we can do good in the world. I am super into renewable, but climate change will not be a problem at the current speed of innovation. We should focus on making the poor richer so they then can care about the environment. We should also tell young people to have kids, that there is not too many people on the planet and we should be way more careful with the risks of nuclear war. Not too long ago we were afraid of widespread famine in the 2000 and the return of Ice age, and probably many others thing.
    - ericd 4y ago
      Does he have a good answer for the problem of overgeneration during the summer months, and undergeneration in winter? If you run the numbers on battery energy density, cost, and what it takes to run an efficient heat pump, it seems clear that renewables alone aren’t quite a solution yet. I’d love to be wrong, though.
      - alfor 4y ago
neovialogistics 4y ago
Someone once commented to me that rather than blaming Mao personally, the blame for the negative consequences of The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution should be placed on the systemic forces that legitimised the absence of domain experts in policy making. It's a nice sentiment but I have a gut feeling that these kinds of frameworks - where blame is taken away from people and attributed to abstract concepts - lead to worse outcomes long-term. Is that gut feeling just my evolutionary instincts talking or is it a sign of something useful?
- ipnon 4y ago
  “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
- majormajor 4y ago
  Well, where did those systemic forces come from? Does it take your right back to Mao? (I have no idea, it just seems curious that suddenly you'd have these systemic forces cause huge problems that didn't exist before...) "It's systemic" isn't a stopping point for an investigation. If you diagnose something as systemic it tells you something about how you're gonna have to fight it, but nothing really about blame. E.g. if you talk about the effects of systemic racism in the US the blame isn't abstract, you can clearly trace back many policies, biases, and differences to active, individual racism over centuries.
- emaginniss 4y ago
  Don't blame Mao, blame the system Mao built!
  - type0 4y ago
    He was a delusional psychopat that was happy to kill as many people as he could
    - boeingUH60 4y ago
      You just described all communist leaders. Fortunately, most of them are extinct at this point.
hintymad 4y ago
And whoever publicly even doubted the decision of Mao was labeled as right-wing who spread misinformation, or counter-revolutionaries who sabotaged the great socialism movement. Maybe there is some truth in the question: who's the arbiter of information?
- nawgz 4y ago
  That sounds like an unfalsifiable claim. Do you have any evidence supporting it, or are you "just asking questions"? Edit: I deserve to have been downvoted, I have misinterpreted the context of "right" in the parent post and they have educated me with articles in turn
  - azemetre 4y ago
    I mean struggle sessions were a real thing. [1] Suppose it's hard to say that any particular person was forced into a struggle session for saying that killing sparrows was wrong, but they were absolutely a thing and mostly used to quell dissent and spread Maoism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
  - revelio 4y ago
    History books? The evidence is abundant, it's weird that this is even in dispute. Not sure what the Chinese term was but the Soviets used the word "bourgeoisie" or sometimes "kulaks" where today we would say right wing/capitalists, and they used пропаганда (propaganda) for what today we would call misinformation. And counter-revolutionaries were just counter-revolutionaries, no change there. The only bit about hintymad's claim that's false is that the people who publicly doubted Mao weren't labelled as things. They were just executed.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      You're in luck, there's a whole wikipedia page covering the named offenses[1] of the cultural revolution. Rightist, reactionary, and class-enemy seem to have been common based on my reading. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_offences_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_offences_in_China
PicassoCTs 4y ago
This article has the causality inverted. The sparrows were just a sideshow to distract from the famines cause. Most famines were caused by the culture of face and the nature of the party. The party dictated a plan, and as failing the plan and making the great leader loose face, ment the local governments loosing face would get them Maos wrath, all the members of the party reported success when it came to harvests. So Mao collected the surplus and sold it to the soviet union, who he with his inferiority complex wanted to impress. After that, starvation raged, and he knew. They all know, but feign to not know, to keep face. Instead, superficial measures are taken. Like hunting scapegoats, spreading crude conspiracy theories inside the country, or hunting harmless sparrows. Busy work to detract from the actual cause. And nothing was learned from this, cultural change was avoided and now its time to go full circle.
- cryptonector 4y ago
  This. Killing the sparrows didn't help, but it wasn't the main cause of the famine. It was the same as Stalin's famines, and he didn't try to get rid of the sparrows. It was just a matter of taking away all incentives for farmers to farm, abusing them, and then using whatever food was available as a weapon for exacting compliance in the ensuing famine. Using food as a weapon means making the famine worse. Add to this all the mismanagement that goes with central planning, and there's a problem.
  - PicassoCTs 4y ago
    And after that, rewrite history, to make it seem like an accident. After all, the plan of the party could never be horrible. Same today, building more coal plants, while half of the country in the south is sliding towards a wet-bulb scenario. 400 Mio living in an area, that could become uninhabitable within a human lifetime, and the plan for that? Get rich faster and run, fuck the peasants, obviously. The chinese deserve some better government of there own choice with some longterm planning, that poured the money into actual working science, to solve the problems they got. But for that this face nonsense has to vanish first.
    - 3y ago
idoubtit 4y ago
I've read about this several times, and I'm not surprised the story is popular. Many people see China as a foe, so they like to smear it. That's alright, but anyone should be extra cautious when a story is just what most people want. Stories tend to inflate and bend to please their auditory. For instance, consider the claim that China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the USSR. Where does it come from? This article seems to be a mash-up of a few sources, mainly Wikipedia. Indeed Wikipedia has the same claim, which is sourced from the book "Mao: The Real Story", by Alexander Pantsov. The said book has just a single sentence about this: "As a result, the Chinese even had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union." A vague assertion: no source, no date, no number of birds. Searching the web only showed many deformations of this (imported from Russia (sic), or USSR and Canada, or imported a million sparrows...). I couldn't find more about this in JSTOR and SciHub. Overall, I haven't see anything compelling about this detail (importing sparrows) and not much about the main claim (killing sparrows is the main cause of the famine). One last thought: pesticides have killed scores of birds and insects, especially in the USA. Probably much more than the Four Pests Campaign did. And ecological imbalances have obviously suffered during the last decades: among others, bees are waning in many countries. It seems a bit hypocritical to blame Mao in the past and forget Monsanto-Bayer and Co in the present.
- warning26 4y ago
  Ah yes, the "fake news" defense.
- netsharc 3y ago
  How about a Russian source, or are they also propaganda pieces against China? https://russian7.ru/post/kak-sssr-spas-kitay-prodav-obychnykh-vor/ https://russian7.ru/post/kak-sssr-spas-kitay-prodav-obychnyk... Google Translate says the USSR sent wagonfuls of sparrows. Btw Mr. Smartypants, no need for your "(sic)" "Russia" is allowed too, it'd be like a country asking the EU for help and Germany responding, Russia was a country which was part of the USSR. The Russian article references papers written by Chinese and Russian scholars, I find it peculiar that you're wary of Western propaganda but yet rely on just English-language sources...
Bran_son 4y ago
The more things change, the more they stay the same: Pollinating Orchards By Hand | Lessons From Sichuan, China - https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by-hand-lessons-from-sichuan-china https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by...
nitwit005 4y ago
Worth noting that poorly planned "pest eradication" campaigns were a global thing. Here in California they paid bounties on a rather wide variety of perceived pest animals. Alaska actually had a bald eagle bounty, as the hunters and fishermen didn't want competition: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=baldeagle.printerfriendly https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=baldeagle.printer...
- cryptonector 4y ago
  That was also when the Population Explosion became a thing, and with it human eradication became a darling of certain people. China tried it with the one child policy.
eternalban 3y ago
Eliminate Four Pests Posters: https://chineseposters.net/themes/four-pests https://chineseposters.net/themes/four-pests https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/pc-1958-025.jpg https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/pc-19...

I didn't realize sparrows ate insects too. The rule of thumb on the farm was "swallows good, sparrows bad". Swallows ate insects and sparrows ate grain. Maybe China could have replaced sparrows with swallows but that would probably have led to a different kind of disaster since importing species has a horrible track record.

yareally 4y ago
Swallows will only eat flying insects and catch them in the air. The common house sparrow typically forges on the ground. The intersection of the insects both species eat is probably close to zero
- Teever 4y ago
  They may eat the same insects but at different phases of their life cycle. Some insects crawl before they fly. and some even fly before they crawl I imagine.

dduugg 4y ago

The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like A Mighty Storm, Suddenly And Furiously Blinding Our Senses. We Stood Transfixed In Blank Devotion As Our Leader Spoke To Us, Looking Down On Our Mute Faces With A Great, Raging, And Unseeing Eye. Like The Howling Glory Of The Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous And The Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts And Clutching Our Innocent Awe. A Message Of Avarice Rained Down And Carried Us Away Into False Dreams Of Endless Riches. "Annihilate The Sparrow, That Stealer Of Seed, And Our Harvests Will Abound; We Will Watch Our Wealth Flood In." And By Our Own Hand Did Every Last Bird Lie Silent In Their Puddles, The Air Barren Of Song As The Clouds Drifted Away. For Killing Their Greatest Enemy, The Locusts Noisily Thanked Us And Turned Their Jaws Toward Our Crops, Swallowing Our Greed Whole. Millions Starved And We Became Skinnier And Skinnier, While Our Leaders Became Fatter And Fatter. Finally, As That Blazing Sun Shone Down Upon Us, Did We Know That True Enemy Was The Voice Of Blind Idolatry; And Only Then Did We Begin To Think For Ourselves. - Red Sparowes, "Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun"

ycombinete 4y ago
For anyone else wondering why each word in this is capitalised: “Despite having no lyrics, the album (by way of its song titles) follows the story of the Great Leap Forward in Mao Zedong-era China, more specifically recounting the Great Sparrow Campaign, a mass killing of sparrows (along with rats, flies and mosquitoes) that fed on a portion of the harvest and were seen as pests.” [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Red_Heart_Shines_Toward_the_Red_Sun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Red_Heart_Shines_Towar...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
OrbOfConfusion 4y ago
A truly fantastic album, start to finish.

rdtsc 4y ago

> The People’s Republic of China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to stop the ecological disruption. That was surprising. I knew about the sparrows and the famine, but had no idea about them being imported later by the hundreds of thousands. > The diversion of labor from harvesting crops to steel production and construction meant crop supplies were left to rot in fields. That was often done in badly built smelters which were not able to produce quality steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace From the wikipedia article: > Mao Zedong defended backyard furnaces despite the shortcomings, claiming that the practice showed mass enthusiasm, mass creativity, and mass participation in economic development. At least with sparrows they sort of acknowledged they screwed up. But the steel furnace comment, reminded me of the local municipality, where we carefully sorted recyclables into multiple streams, which later turned out were dumped into a single landfill. Eventually, the municipality told people to stop sorting the materials, and just use the one bin, but people refused and raised complaints. The city understood their error, apologized, and reverted their decision, letting citizens perform their sorting ritual, but in the end still dumped everything into one large landfill.

jmclnx 4y ago

I wonder if any sparrow species unique to China went extinct ? I did a search but no real info, the searches I found only talked about native vs imported. Not species that only exist in China.

kevviiinn 4y ago

I find it rather strange that people tend to blame the famine on communism and central planning

chaostheory 4y ago
Why?
nradov 4y ago
Central planning usually causes shortages of everything including food. Famines are a routine occurrence under communism. https://victimsofcommunism.org/curriculum-chapter-2/ https://victimsofcommunism.org/curriculum-chapter-2/
- quacked 4y ago
  After reading several autobiographies of people who lived in the USSR, I've started to think that material shortages are actually the deliberate goal of people who run communist countries. More succinctly, without material shortages, communist-inspired governments rapidly cease to exist. If the People are not presently experiencing a material shortage, then they do not rely on authority figures to go about the daily business of feeding and policing themselves. Without regular contact between the People and the central authority personnel, it becomes impossible for the central authority personnel to supervise and grant/revoke permissions for them. Supervision and permission were the two components absolutely required for the government of the USSR to continue to exist--supervision allows for the early identification of threats to the government structure, and "permission" systems create excuses for the government to deploy the violent martial caste against threats to their supremacy. (It is self-evident that people don't like living inside systems where they're constantly monitored and supervised; millions of people around the world work very hard to leave supervision-heavy countries for less-supervised ones. Also, children everywhere chafe against school, and prisoners chafe against prison.) So I don't believe a truly centrally-planned, communist government will ever generate a useful material surplus (food, medicine, tools, etc.). If it did, the People who enjoyed the results of the surplus would immediately stop participating in the centrally planned processes mandated upon them by the planning committees. Conversely, the first thing any centrally-planned government will do is organize itself in such a way that all important goods become scarce, so that it can guarantee regular contact points with citizens and set up a robust system of permission granting and revocation.

bluSCALE4 4y ago

This is why I was concerned when I heard Google, of all companies, released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out. I'm curious what happened with this effort. It's not exactly a vote of confidence when the other guy trying to do this is Bill Gates.

ransom1538 4y ago
"released lab grown mosquitos to wipe them out" Spoiler alert. We lose fish. All fresh water fish. Not as bad as fucking with bees. But a close second.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  bats and birds would suffer also
goda90 4y ago
Generally those efforts are targeted at disease carrying mosquitoes. There are other species of mosquitoes in the same regions and there aren't any animals that only eat one kind of mosquito.
- Brybry 4y ago
  To add to this, the disease carrying mosquito species like aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus are invasive species in the Americas. These mosquitoes do some pollination but given that they're invasive it probably wouldn't be a big deal to wipe them out. Also, invasiveness is true of a lot of pests in North America: the American cockroach isn't American, it's from Africa. Brown rats, red/fire ants, and wild pigs are also imported/invasive.
  - hidroto 4y ago
    a complication to eradicating a invasive species is when that species has replaced a native species ecological niche. getting rid of it at that point may cause more problems then it solves.

abudabi123 4y ago

How does the targetting of the sparrow species for annihilation in China compare to the post-Columbus ongoing deforestation in the Americas's? Xi does have the ecological health of the environment on his policy priority list which is a change from previous leadership driven by slavery to economic devop. There are documentaries on little birds by the sea. They have their place.

scythe 4y ago
Practically no other event in human history comes close to the ecological and cultural destructive impact of the early colonial period in the Americas. But because of that, it should not be used as a yardstick for anything else. "It's not the worst thing ever" is a poor defense of anything.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  On a similar note, there's a danger of comparing "the early colonial period in the Americas", a 300-400 year period containing many distinguishable catastrophes, to anything not of equal scale. It's kind of like comparing an apple and a whole apple tree.
  - scythe 4y ago
    A fair complaint, but I didn't put the comparison; the poster I responded to did.
    - andrewflnr 4y ago
      Quite. I'm extending your point, not disagreeing. :)
- pvaldes 4y ago
  > Practically no other event in human history comes close to the ecological and cultural destructive impact of the early colonial period in the Americas. This is a really optimistic point of view
4y ago

alfor 4y ago

Another example of the peril of central planning and total authority. Make me think of the climate change orthodoxy were we focus solely on co2 and forget about all the other human problems.

jemmyw 4y ago
Not really. Climate change is a multiplier or interwoven with lot of those other problems. Plus burning fossil fuels is so central to our economies that we haven't even stopped co2 emissions rising. If we'd actually focused on co2, rather than the less than minimum effort made so far, then maybe there'd be more space for the other problems. Instead this one problem looms larger and larger.
- alfor 4y ago
  Look into the work of Tony Seba: renewable are on an exponential growth. Tesla Master plan 3 highlight the step needed to fully transition Bjorn Longburgh explain in his book and interview what are the different priorities and costs associated with the different way we can do good in the world. I am super into renewable, but climate change will not be a problem at the current speed of innovation. We should focus on making the poor richer so they then can care about the environment. We should also tell young people to have kids, that there is not too many people on the planet and we should be way more careful with the risks of nuclear war. Not too long ago we were afraid of widespread famine in the 2000 and the return of Ice age, and probably many others thing.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Does he have a good answer for the problem of overgeneration during the summer months, and undergeneration in winter? If you run the numbers on battery energy density, cost, and what it takes to run an efficient heat pump, it seems clear that renewables alone aren’t quite a solution yet. I’d love to be wrong, though.
    - alfor 4y ago

neovialogistics 4y ago

Someone once commented to me that rather than blaming Mao personally, the blame for the negative consequences of The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution should be placed on the systemic forces that legitimised the absence of domain experts in policy making. It's a nice sentiment but I have a gut feeling that these kinds of frameworks - where blame is taken away from people and attributed to abstract concepts - lead to worse outcomes long-term. Is that gut feeling just my evolutionary instincts talking or is it a sign of something useful?

ipnon 4y ago
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
majormajor 4y ago
Well, where did those systemic forces come from? Does it take your right back to Mao? (I have no idea, it just seems curious that suddenly you'd have these systemic forces cause huge problems that didn't exist before...) "It's systemic" isn't a stopping point for an investigation. If you diagnose something as systemic it tells you something about how you're gonna have to fight it, but nothing really about blame. E.g. if you talk about the effects of systemic racism in the US the blame isn't abstract, you can clearly trace back many policies, biases, and differences to active, individual racism over centuries.
emaginniss 4y ago
Don't blame Mao, blame the system Mao built!
- type0 4y ago
  He was a delusional psychopat that was happy to kill as many people as he could
  - boeingUH60 4y ago
    You just described all communist leaders. Fortunately, most of them are extinct at this point.

hintymad 4y ago

And whoever publicly even doubted the decision of Mao was labeled as right-wing who spread misinformation, or counter-revolutionaries who sabotaged the great socialism movement. Maybe there is some truth in the question: who's the arbiter of information?

nawgz 4y ago
That sounds like an unfalsifiable claim. Do you have any evidence supporting it, or are you "just asking questions"? Edit: I deserve to have been downvoted, I have misinterpreted the context of "right" in the parent post and they have educated me with articles in turn
- azemetre 4y ago
  I mean struggle sessions were a real thing. [1] Suppose it's hard to say that any particular person was forced into a struggle session for saying that killing sparrows was wrong, but they were absolutely a thing and mostly used to quell dissent and spread Maoism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
- revelio 4y ago
  History books? The evidence is abundant, it's weird that this is even in dispute. Not sure what the Chinese term was but the Soviets used the word "bourgeoisie" or sometimes "kulaks" where today we would say right wing/capitalists, and they used пропаганда (propaganda) for what today we would call misinformation. And counter-revolutionaries were just counter-revolutionaries, no change there. The only bit about hintymad's claim that's false is that the people who publicly doubted Mao weren't labelled as things. They were just executed.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    You're in luck, there's a whole wikipedia page covering the named offenses[1] of the cultural revolution. Rightist, reactionary, and class-enemy seem to have been common based on my reading. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_offences_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_offences_in_China

PicassoCTs 4y ago

This article has the causality inverted. The sparrows were just a sideshow to distract from the famines cause. Most famines were caused by the culture of face and the nature of the party. The party dictated a plan, and as failing the plan and making the great leader loose face, ment the local governments loosing face would get them Maos wrath, all the members of the party reported success when it came to harvests. So Mao collected the surplus and sold it to the soviet union, who he with his inferiority complex wanted to impress. After that, starvation raged, and he knew. They all know, but feign to not know, to keep face. Instead, superficial measures are taken. Like hunting scapegoats, spreading crude conspiracy theories inside the country, or hunting harmless sparrows. Busy work to detract from the actual cause. And nothing was learned from this, cultural change was avoided and now its time to go full circle.

cryptonector 4y ago
This. Killing the sparrows didn't help, but it wasn't the main cause of the famine. It was the same as Stalin's famines, and he didn't try to get rid of the sparrows. It was just a matter of taking away all incentives for farmers to farm, abusing them, and then using whatever food was available as a weapon for exacting compliance in the ensuing famine. Using food as a weapon means making the famine worse. Add to this all the mismanagement that goes with central planning, and there's a problem.
- PicassoCTs 4y ago
  And after that, rewrite history, to make it seem like an accident. After all, the plan of the party could never be horrible. Same today, building more coal plants, while half of the country in the south is sliding towards a wet-bulb scenario. 400 Mio living in an area, that could become uninhabitable within a human lifetime, and the plan for that? Get rich faster and run, fuck the peasants, obviously. The chinese deserve some better government of there own choice with some longterm planning, that poured the money into actual working science, to solve the problems they got. But for that this face nonsense has to vanish first.
  - 3y ago

idoubtit 4y ago

I've read about this several times, and I'm not surprised the story is popular. Many people see China as a foe, so they like to smear it. That's alright, but anyone should be extra cautious when a story is just what most people want. Stories tend to inflate and bend to please their auditory. For instance, consider the claim that China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the USSR. Where does it come from? This article seems to be a mash-up of a few sources, mainly Wikipedia. Indeed Wikipedia has the same claim, which is sourced from the book "Mao: The Real Story", by Alexander Pantsov. The said book has just a single sentence about this: "As a result, the Chinese even had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union." A vague assertion: no source, no date, no number of birds. Searching the web only showed many deformations of this (imported from Russia (sic), or USSR and Canada, or imported a million sparrows...). I couldn't find more about this in JSTOR and SciHub. Overall, I haven't see anything compelling about this detail (importing sparrows) and not much about the main claim (killing sparrows is the main cause of the famine). One last thought: pesticides have killed scores of birds and insects, especially in the USA. Probably much more than the Four Pests Campaign did. And ecological imbalances have obviously suffered during the last decades: among others, bees are waning in many countries. It seems a bit hypocritical to blame Mao in the past and forget Monsanto-Bayer and Co in the present.

warning26 4y ago
Ah yes, the "fake news" defense.
netsharc 3y ago
How about a Russian source, or are they also propaganda pieces against China? https://russian7.ru/post/kak-sssr-spas-kitay-prodav-obychnykh-vor/ https://russian7.ru/post/kak-sssr-spas-kitay-prodav-obychnyk... Google Translate says the USSR sent wagonfuls of sparrows. Btw Mr. Smartypants, no need for your "(sic)" "Russia" is allowed too, it'd be like a country asking the EU for help and Germany responding, Russia was a country which was part of the USSR. The Russian article references papers written by Chinese and Russian scholars, I find it peculiar that you're wary of Western propaganda but yet rely on just English-language sources...

Bran_son 4y ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same: Pollinating Orchards By Hand | Lessons From Sichuan, China - https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by-hand-lessons-from-sichuan-china https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by...

nitwit005 4y ago

Worth noting that poorly planned "pest eradication" campaigns were a global thing. Here in California they paid bounties on a rather wide variety of perceived pest animals. Alaska actually had a bald eagle bounty, as the hunters and fishermen didn't want competition: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=baldeagle.printerfriendly https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=baldeagle.printer...

cryptonector 4y ago
That was also when the Population Explosion became a thing, and with it human eradication became a darling of certain people. China tried it with the one child policy.

eternalban 3y ago

Eliminate Four Pests Posters: https://chineseposters.net/themes/four-pests https://chineseposters.net/themes/four-pests https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/pc-1958-025.jpg https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/pc-19...