Killing sparrows led to famines in China

https://www.historydefined.net/how-killing-sparrows-led-to-one-of-the-greatest-famines-in-history/

106 107 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_Towar...

OrbOfConfusion• 3 years ago

A truly fantastic album, start to finish.

rdtsc2• 3 years 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

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• 3 years 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.

kevviiinn3• 3 years ago

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

chaostheory• 3 years ago

Why?

nradov• 3 years ago

Central planning usually causes shortages of everything including food. Famines are a routine occurrence under communism.

https://victimsofcommunism.org/curriculum-chapter-2/

quacked• 3 years 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.

Fernicia• 3 years ago

What is strange about that?

zabzonk6• 3 years ago

who else would you blame it on? communist, centralised states are reknown for causing these kinds of problems - look at the ussr in the 1920s and 30s.

kevviiinn3• 3 years ago

So the ideas of communism is what cause people to kill off sparrows or was it just bad information and bad/incomplete research on what role sparrows played

fdye• 3 years ago

So I think its fair to say the USSR, China, Cuba, North Kora were a form of communism that had the following characteristics. 1. Authoritarian 2. Central planning (perhaps the same thing) 3. Slow to change These are all valid criticisms based on what we know from history, etc. I think there is a bit of nuance here though based on a glance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines and some basic history. 1. China did experience some horrible famines, particularly the '59-'61. However, they had experienced these, ~20years+/- 10 years, since at least the 1800s, perhaps 1700. That is well into royal rule prior to the revolution. Particularly the 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 (Four famines, ~45Mil dead). Just saying, objectively, not sure the average peasant was more or less likely to experience a famine under the royal rule or communism. 2. Russia and the surrounding neighbors that were consumed by the USSR, seem to have a similar story. The Tsar's in particular were not very good at economics, logistics, or resource management. 3. Post WWII cold war meant virtually every communist country was isolated and sort of by definition a centralized state. They were locked out of the emerging reserve currency (Dollar). They could not freely go to market with their goods. As well as they were all sort of frenemies of each other (see relationship between Korea, China, and USSR for examples).

Look I'm no great lover of communism, I sat through the same U.S. history classes in the 80's-90's, saw the wall fall on TV, etc. That said I think the one thing no one acknowledges is that people don't start revolutions and try out radical types of government because their lives are going just swell! Shit maybe its to much Civ as a kid, but I think its important to be honest about the pluses and minuses of government and the specifics of the people, region, and time period that these changes occur.

Tiktaalik• 3 years ago

It wasn't just the communists that were not thinking about the consequences, making moronic choices and ruining ecosystems.

See also: Frogs and Rabbits in Australia, Deer in Haida Gwaii, Mongooses in Hawaii, the list goes on and on...

more_corn• 3 years ago

This was 100% a problem caused by central planning and failure to consider second order effects.

But at the core the problem was blindly following the suggestion of a leader who is not making evidence based decisions. This will always end in tragedy.

I regret to report that such leaders can and do emerge under every economic system.

Maybe free markets are less susceptible to them because the leaders have less power over people’s lives in free markets.

Perhaps the takeaway should Be to limit the power our leaders have over us because the world is complex and a central plan will never encompass the realities of every individual.

bluSCALE42• 3 years 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.

goda90• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

lostlogin2• 3 years ago

The Gates’ have a pretty spectacular track record, what do you mean?

bluSCALE42• 3 years ago

Like buying up farmland an using GMOs.

zabzonk6• 3 years ago

It's not exactly a vote of confidence when the other guy trying to do this is Bill Gates

yeah, a super-villain trying to wipe out malaria - what is his cunning plan?

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

History runs in circles. Everybody wants to be an hero, so they will refuse to see the danger or to understand that ecosystems don't grant a second try if you change something and regret it later.

Mao died in 1976. Sparrows still remain extinct in most of China.

ransom1538• 3 years 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.

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

bats and birds would suffer also

seesawtron• 3 years ago

Bill Gates foundation is also sponsoring GMOs in Africa. These include lab designed mosquitos that can be introduced in the existing population to eradicate mosquitos.

abudabi123• 3 years 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.

scythe2• 3 years 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.

andrewflnr2• 3 years 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.

pvaldes3• 3 years 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

justrealist• 3 years ago

post-Columbus ongoing deforestation in the Americas's

It's an open question how much of the Americas were actually heavily forested before western disease killed 95% of the population.

A lot of what Europeans saw when they explored was basically post-apocalyptic wilderness which had sprung up in the 100-200 years since the vast majority of the population was killed.

throwawaymaths2• 3 years ago

Xi does have the ecological health of the environment on his policy priority list

And as a consequence of this policy, how many new coal power plants has china opened?

https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-....

8note• 3 years ago

I think that's the wrong question.

How many fewer coal plants were opened than would have been opened without that policy?

alfor3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

alfor3• 3 years 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.

kelseyfrog• 3 years ago

On the other side of the coin is the anarchy of thought that exists around COVID. It's almost like humans societies are a complex series of trade offs irreducible to the simplicities of total authority or total anarchy.

neovialogistics• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

majormajor• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Don't blame Mao, blame the system Mao built!

type0• 3 years ago

He was a delusional psychopat that was happy to kill as many people as he could

dirtyid5• 3 years ago

Official CCP position on was Mao 70% right and 30% wrong. There wasn't lack of domain experts per say, rather Mao pursued modernization agendas at aggressive rate, one that traded lives for progress. 4 pests / killing sparrows didn't lead to famines, the bureaucracy trying to hit Maos KPIs did. Which does not necessarily lead to...

worse outcomes long-term

Contrary hot take. PRC post WW2 traded lives for progress was net good for long-term outcomes. Mao was bad statesman for right goals, he was excessive and did the hard things sometimes poorly, but it was important to do them none the less. The great leap forward killed millions, but ensured PRC also had the highest industrial capacity amongst developing peers after. Cultural revolution broke traditional social structures = 90%+ unified polity, speaking one language. Purging intelligentsia also overkill, but still had STEM priorities right, both nukes + first satellite developed in this era. In aggregate, disruptions setup/enabled PRC to exploit mass modernization efforts, established industrial base, and plenty of fungible bodies within a few generations instead of century+. Add oil on cramming developement atrocities to develop. Incidentally this is why pluralism of India and old practices (caste) etc is holding up development, India systemically couldn't destroy to renew, now it’s dragged down by the baggage causing 100s of millions of avoidable deaths and even more bodies with stunted development - a few decades of prolonged developing world infant mortality and food insecurity adds up. Treating human capital as actual capital is not nice, but it's effective.

Hard to say if this was actually his thinking at the time, but he's also known for declaring: "I’m not afraid of nuclear war ... China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left."

cryptonector3• 3 years ago

>worse outcomes long-term
Contrary hot take. PRC post WW2 traded lives for progress was net good for long-term outcomes.

"You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette."

"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."

"By all means necessary."

"The ends justify the means."

Disgusting.

dirtyid5• 3 years ago

@xeonmc [flagged] [dead]

So what you’re saying is, India is badly in need of a cultural revolution?

Maybe 50/60 years ago post partition. But too late now, IMO India system finally built up some momentum + favourable external conditions while starting very precarious transition period. IN trending towards 1.7B medium term with weaker state capacity than PRC dealing with 2/3 that amount. 1/3 of PRC household still medium income developing poor. Worst thing they can do is try massive restructuring that reduces state capacity further, they're best course is to be doomed to continue muddle along which at India scale might still mean great things for fraction of population. Unfortunately, my guess is that means 40%+ of workforce trapped in subsistence farming and weak female labour participation bordering on repressive Islamic country level. Too much people = demographic curse, India likely not going to maintain growth to keep up with even new (male) job demand, will get old before rich, basically the worst case scenario for PRC demographers that slammed through family planning / one child policy. On the other hand 1/3 of India doing well + geography makes her a formidable power.

E: One useful socially disruptive thing India can do is massively incentivize inter cast marriages to demolish cast within a couple generations. Basically open limited pool of tier1 / high income opportunities to more candidates and select for the best. Also prevent brain drain.

kwere• 3 years ago

wasnt Mao planning geared toward a "forever war" against the bourgeoisie, to explain putting industrial capacity toward "military" needs in uneconomic areas and/or most of other nation building projects? All obviously limited by Mao dumbness.

Deng Xiaoping regeared the nation apparatus toward a non-antagonistic way in the "hide your strenght, bide your time fashion", kicking the economic boom.

Obviously the chinese top-down approach is showing its shortcomings with the impendent economic & demographic collapse.

India is already at a sustainable demographics growth, only its (muslim) minorities are prospected to grow at unsustainable rates

hintymad5• 3 years 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?

nawgz2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

revelio3• 3 years 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.

hintymad5• 3 years ago

Oh my god, are you serious? Or I just naively assumed that the dark history of China back in the 50s and 60s are well known? The Great Leap Forward. The Anti-Right Campaign (BTW, “right” in Marxism terms are akin to the left in the western world). The Four Cleansing Movement. The Campaign to Eliminate the Four Pests… Millions of people died of hunger and millions more lost their civil rights for decades! People who questioned whether an acre could produce more than 5000KG of rice got persecuted.

Just do the Google search on the terms.

hintymad5• 3 years ago

In addition, do check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zhixin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Zhao, and https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/politics-guilt-092820.... Mind you, the "crimes" these people "committed" were deemed serious by the progressives during those times. Yeah, so much for the left wanting to censor information.

rdtsc2• 3 years ago

Even asking questions is not a bad way to keep the conversion going. Not every sentence has to be proven logically and supported by extensive research and references.

hintymad5• 3 years ago

I honestly hope that people didn’t downvote the comment because of the mention of “right”. The “right” in China (or the third Internationale in general) is akin to the liberals in the western world.

The whole point of the comment is that truth matters and freedom of speech matters and government or any entity alone can’t be the arbiter of information

dang• 3 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543940.

PicassoCTs3• 3 years 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.

cryptonector3• 3 years 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.

PicassoCTs3• 3 years 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.

CrackerNews7• 3 years ago

Part of Mao's enduring legacy was his concept of the party line adapting to the will of the masses, and the sparrow extermination campaign was a failure in adapting the party line to this farmer discontent too well.

Mao did change Chinese culture, but it was by purging Western-style intellectuals and promoting mass organization to take command from the bottom-up, because he saw people on the ground being more correct than intellectuals who might not apply their learning to the actual conditions.

The successors after Mao adopting Deng Xiaoping's liberal attitudes towards economic development can be seen as a Party rebuke of Mao's policies. Yet they will still uphold Mao's legacy.

idoubtit• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Ah yes, the "fake news" defense.

netsharc• 3 years ago

How about a Russian source, or are they also propaganda pieces against China? 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• 3 years 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...

nitwit005• 3 years 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.printer...

cryptonector3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Eliminate Four Pests Posters:

https://chineseposters.net/themes/four-pests

https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/2020-06/pc-19...

Killing sparrows led to famines in China

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