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Mao’s War on Sparrows
Background
In 1949, the civil war between Mao Zedong’s Communist Party and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Party ended with a total win by Mao, driving out the Nationalist Party to Taiwan. Although Mao and the Communist Party had won, China was extremely unstable due to the weakened economy and the lack of industrial infrastructure. China’s involvement with the Korean War in 1950 further wrecked the economy.
China attempted to industrialize itself by mimicking the Soviet model of industrialization. However, it did not take long for Mao to realize that China lacked funds to even begin to industrialize. Realizing this, in 1954, Mao launched a national campaign to transform China into a self-sufficient agricultural state. It was a campaign to reform China’s economic fundamentals by fueling its economy with collective farming, where farmers reap and sow what the state assigns them and the state controls all production.
In 1958, Mao and the Communist Party launched a national economic program called “The Great Leap Forward”, aimed to greatly build the economy through agriculture-focused approaches. Mao made the goal of the program for China’s economy to surpass that of Great Britain’s in 15 years. However, this approach was largely a failure as total…
