Four Pests Campaign
Sign in to saveChinese government policy encouraging hostility to perceived pests
Wikidata facts
- Part of
- Great Leap Forward
- Duration
- 4
- Image
- Kill bird and insect.jpg
Show 4 more facts
- start time
- 1958-03-18
- end time
- 1962-00-00
- has immediate cause
- Passeridae
- Commons category
- Four Pests campaign
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~8 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Chinese poster reading "Exterminate The Four Pests" (Chinese: 除四害; pinyin: Chú Sì Hài), 1958.The Four Pests campaign (Chinese: 除四害; pinyin: Chú Sì Hài) was one of the first campaigns of the Great Leap Forward in Maoist China from 1958 to 1962. Authorities targeted four "pests" for elimination: rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.
The extermination of sparrows – also known as the Eliminate Sparrows campaign – resulted in severe ecological imbalance, and was one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine which lasted from 1959 to 1961, with an estimated death toll due to starvation ranging in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million). In 1960, the campaign against sparrows ended, and bed bugs replaced them as an official target.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Four Pests Campaign” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.