What the world’s worst famine can teach us about controlling nature

The year was 1958, and sparrows were seen falling from the sky all over China.

But they weren’t dying from natural causes. They were being shot down with slingshots or guns, or dying of exhaustion as swaths of people drove them away by banging pots and pans, preventing them from landing.

This horrifying spectacle was part of the country’s Four Pests Campaign – a public health initiative launched by Communist leader Mao Zedong that targeted flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows.

The mass killing of these ‘pests’ was a stark display of Mao’s belief that humans must “conquer nature” – but at what cost?

Some studies have linked the sparrow campaign to the Great Chinese Famine, finding that the eradication of sparrows removed a key predator, allowing locusts to surge and consume grain crops.

Other research points to deeper systemic problems, especially with Mao’s massive Great Leap Forward campaign, an ambitious program that aimed to drastically expand and collectivize China’s heavy industry through the creation of ‘people’s communes.’

Instead, it ended up causing the worst famine in history, claiming an estimated 30 to 55 million lives.

When science is silenced

When the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, China was battling widespread infectious diseases that were disabling and killing millions.

In response to this public health crisis, Mao launched the Four Pests Campaign in an attempt to eliminate carriers of disease – particularly mosquitoes, rats and flies.

The fourth ‘pest’ on the list was the sparrow, which was believed to reduce grain production, thus competing with people for food.

The Chinese government ordered its citizens to catch and kill as many sparrows as they could. The result was hundreds of millions of dead birds – driving them almost to extinction. 

But the campaign ultimately backfired terribly: without sparrows to control them, locusts infested the grain fields, devastating agricultural production.

The sparrow-killing campaign wasn’t the sole cause of the famine, but it was a symptom of a deeper problem: what happens when political leaders ignore science?

During the Great Leap Forward, Mao launched the Anti‑Rightist Campaign, creating a climate that silenced all forms of dissent – including from scientists who warned that killing sparrows would hurt grain yields.

The famine that followed was a complex crisis driven by a combination of structural issues, including poor agricultural policies, political repression and systemic mismanagement.

“There were lots of times when the Chinese people would say that Mao was a great soldier, but he did not understand development,” says Judith Shapiro, author of Mao’s War Against Nature.

The idea of top-down mass action might be well-intentioned, but what do you do when the emperor is wrong?

According to Shapiro’s interviews, some scientists felt helpless to intervene: “We knew it was wrong, but we couldn’t say anything because we were being criticized.”

Meanwhile, under pressure to meet unrealistic production targets, “local leaders were lying to gain favor from the higher leaders about how much grain they were producing,” Shapiro says.

The sparrow slaughter, she suggests, was partly fueled by the suppression of free speech, enabling deeply flawed policies to go unchecked.

“This kind of misinformation and the extraction of grain from the countryside to feed the cities – and even international allies – I think is even more at the root of the famine.”

Even the famine itself was kept tightly under wraps: for years, many urban Chinese remained blissfully unaware of what their rural counterparts were facing.

This somber chapter of Chinese history serves as a powerful reminder that misinformation isn’t just a thing of the past. 

On the contrary, climate misinformation is more widespread than ever today, and it’s undermining public support for the climate action that we need.

Rallying the troops

So, has China learned any lessons from the mistakes that led to the world’s worst famine?

In some aspects, little has changed in the country’s public health responses. The Maoist model of Patriotic Public Health Campaigns (PPHC) remains very much alive today, emphasizing broad public participation.

Much like the Four Pests Campaign, China’s responses to the SARS epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic involved similar rallying cries to defeat the viruses through grand, coordinated mass action.

“All campaigns were portrayed as patriotic efforts where the whole community was getting together, mobilizing itself,” says Miriam Gross, professor of modern Chinese and Asian history and international and area studies at the University of Oklahoma.

According to Gross’s research, these mass campaigns today may have been driven by a shortage of medical personnel, hence the need to restore public trust by performatively showing that the government was taking decisive action.

China in fact revived the Four Pests Campaign in its response to SARS in 2003, says Gross – albeit replacing sparrows with cockroaches, as well as expanding it to include dogs.

Regardless of whether it had any effect on preventing the disease from spreading, it successfully galvanized the public because it turned an abstract health problem into a visible threat – blaming diseases on tangible pests like rats and mosquitoes. 

“It’s the type of target that has a real logic for common people,” says Gross. “I do think they’re an easy target, because everyone hates them, right? It’s not like a sweet little cute mammal.”

But by offering symbolic ‘stand-ins’ for invisible diseases, the mass killing campaigns fell short of fostering real understanding of prevention or addressing the actual cause: pathogens.

“Pathogens are unimaginable, not a disease concept that’s there,” Gross argues, “so the whole idea of preventive healthcare – of campaigns to eliminate something before it happens – don’t work with the other disease causalities.”

“They have come up with logics that seem to legitimize the crazy things they’re being asked to do,” she adds.

Fixing the climate – or breaking it?

Conquering nature was a central tenet of Maoism, which saw propaganda posters published with slogans like “make the mountains bow their heads and the rivers give way.” 

“It’s interesting, this idea that through sheer force of human will and human organization, you can make nature change its fundamental behavior and change the laws of nature,” Shapiro says.

History offers numerous examples of humans trying to control nature without success – from chopping up starfish to shooting emus with machine guns.

And while it’s imperative to take action against the escalating climate crisis, we risk repeating more of the same mistakes if we try to tweak the Earth’s systems, such as through solar geoengineering – a method whose effects are not yet well understood.

Such large-scale interventions can have unintended consequences that, at worst, could replicate the disastrous results of the Four Pests Campaign. 

“The belief in some kind of quick fix is risky,” Shapiro says. “During the Mao period, there was a notion that by mobilizing everybody, they could catch up with Russia and achieve Communism overnight.”

“There’s terrible urgency to deal with our environmental crises today,” she adds, “but we have to be careful if somebody’s putting forward some kind of technological solution that isn’t very well-tested.”

Approaching nature with more humility

The Great Chinese Famine was a sobering reminder of the risks of trying to control nature instead of working with it. 

Human activity has pushed many ecosystems to the brink, with only about 3 percent of the Earth’s land remaining untouched, and even well-meaning technocratic solutions can sometimes fall into the trap of oversimplifying how nature actually works.

That tendency persists. As Gross notes, modern interventions are often shaped by short funding or electoral cycles, which tend to favor quick, easy-to-sell solutions: “one simple, one-size-fits-all solution is much easier to sell to funders.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s the only path. Recognizing these pressures can pave the way for smarter, more thoughtful designs or solutions that balance urgency with nuance and adaptability.

“I do think public participation and civil society are really important here,” Shapiro says. “On the one hand, top-down policies are not going to be implemented well if people don’t understand them and accept them, and if they haven’t had a voice in creating them.”

Furthermore, past disasters offer today’s scientists, policymakers and communities with valuable hindsight. 

They serve as cautionary tales to help guide our environmental and health campaigns, reminding us that large-scale interventions can have unforeseen, potentially devastating consequences – especially if critical voices are ignored and narratives are oversimplified.

“Have a little more humility vis-à-vis nature and a little more appreciation of the wisdom of nature,” Shapiro advises. “Biodiversity has been created together – co-created, co-evolved over centuries and centuries.”

“We should go a little more slowly sometimes.”