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 an

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.