Is it true that China imported hundreds of thousands of sparrows from the USSR and Canada?

The articles on the famous Chinese campaign to destroy sparrows, which are published in Russian-speaking media, blogs and social networks, states that the import of sparrows from abroad helped to restore the population of these birds from abroad. We checked the reliability of this information.

Texts that tell in detail about the history of the destruction of sparrows in China at the turn of the 1950-1960s, as a rule, end with the words: “The campaign was recognized as erroneous, and Mao Zedong made a personal decision on the suspension of the struggle with the sparrow. To restore the sparrows population, these birds from Canada and the USSR had to be imported into the country. ” Such publications can be found in Facebook, "VKontakte", On entertainment sites, in the magazine "Amateur", The newspaper"Arguments and facts", Publication Techinsider and other sources.

The campaign called “Four Pests” was part of the economic and political program “Big Cork” (1958–1962), which was held by the government Mao Zedong. The four main enemies of the Chinese economy were declared rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Particular attention was paid to sparrows: Chinese scientists calculated that each sparrow annually eats about 4.5 kg of grains, and the destruction of 1 million sparrows could theoretically save food for feeding 60,000 people.

Stefano Mankuso in the book "Nation of Plants" quotes The memoirs of the Soviet scientist Mikhail Klochko, who witnessed the start of the campaign against sparrows in Beijing: “In the morning I was awakened by a female cry. Throwing to the window, I saw a young woman who ran back and forth along the roof of a neighboring house, feverishly shaking a bamboo sixth, to which a large sheet was attached. Suddenly a woman stopped screaming, apparently to take a breath, but a moment later, below, at the end of the street, he scored the drum, and she again began to publish the shredding screams and frantically shake her unusual banner. This went on for several minutes. Then the drums subsided, the woman too. Then I noticed that on all the upper floors of my hotel, women, dressed in white, were waved with sheets and towels, preventing sparrows from sitting on the building. It was the beginning of the Great Sparrow campaign. All day I heard drums, shots, screams, saw the fluttering sheets, but never had noticed a single sparrow anywhere. It is difficult to say, the poor birds felt a deadly threat and flew in advance to a safe area or in this place there were never sparrows at all. But the battle continued, not subsiding, until noon, and the entire hotel staff participated in it: a porter, administrators, translators, maids and all the rest. ”

Environmental consequences were not long in coming. Dutch synologist Frank Dicetter in his book "The great hunger of Mao"Writes:" By April 1960, when the leadership realized that the birds also eat insects, sparrows were excluded from the list of pests, replacing them with bugs. But it was too late: after 1958, mass invasions of insects began, destroying a significant part of the crop. The greatest damage was caused before harvesting - flocks of locusts obscured the sky and covered the rural area with a lively moving carpet, devouring crops. In the summer of 1961, taking advantage of the drought in the province of Hubay, they captured about 13,000 hectares only in the Xiaogan area. In the area of ​​Jinzhou, more than 50,000 hectares were devastated. In general, in the province, about 15% of the rice crop was destroyed by a voracious locust. Everything was eaten out - in the area of ​​Ichan more than half of all cotton was lost. In the vicinity of Nankin, where they were especially fiercely fought with sparrows, about 60% of all fields were damaged by insects in the fall of 1960, which led to an acute lack of vegetables. ” This environmental imbalance has become one of the reasons Great Chinese hunger, which led to death, according to various estimates, from 15 to 55 million people. It was then, according to Internet publications, China imported sparrows from the USSR and Canada in order to somehow rectify the situation. 

However, all these events took place against the backdrop of rapidly worsening Soviet-Chinese relations. Mao Zedong He remained unhappy Their leadership of the Soviet leadership first at closed party meetings, and then publicly, began to criticize the decolinization in the USSR. He accused the USSR of treason with the ideals of Leninism, and in 1962, as Viktor Usov writes in the book "History of China", And even said that the leadership of the country and the party in the USSR is now usurped by revisionists. This criticism did not go unnoticed in the USSR, and in the end occurred Full gap relations between the two countries. They recovered only after the death of Mao Zedong. As for Canada, since 1951 this country did not even have a diplomatic relationship with China, they Restored Only in 1970. In addition, the population prevails in Canada house sparrows, and in China they lived and live mainly Field.

If you still allow the hypothetical possibility that in the name of saving nature, China and the USSR for a short time forgot about disagreements, it would take many years to prepare such an operation. For example, in order to grow several tens of thousands of pigeons (in different sources, specific figures differ, fluctuating between 30,000 and 40,000) to open a festival of youth and students, it took a year of preparation. The existence of this program is evidenced by numerous documents: Decree of the Executive Committee of the Moscow City Council "On the delivery and breeding of pigeons in Moscow" Methodological recommendations for pigeon breeding, publications V press, photos. The transportation of hundreds of thousands (or even, as some sources write, millions) of sparrows to China would be a much larger project, but there is not a single evidence of such an operation in open sources. Import Vorobyov both from the USSR and Canada is not mentioned in the most authoritative English -language publications about the Four Pest campaign and the great Chinese hunger - books "The great hunger of Mao»Frank Dicetter,"Tombstone. Great Hunger in China 1958–1962»Yang Jichen and"Mao's struggle with nature"Judith Shapiro. 

Thus, in neither Russian nor in foreign sources there are reliable data that would confirm the sending of a large number of sparrows from the USSR to China. In addition, relations between the two states at that time were aggravated, and the probability that the Chinese government would turn to the USSR for help was extremely low. The same can be said about Canada. Apparently, the population of sparrows was restored by a natural way.

Photo on the cover: screenshot baijiahao.baidu.com

Not true

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