SPECTRE CLASSICS --- BAD MOVES IN CENTRAL PLANNING
spectre
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,863327,00.html
May. 05, 1958
"No warrior shall be withdrawn until the battle is won," proclaimed
the Peking People's Daily. "All must join battle ardently and
courageously; we must persevere with the doggedness of
revolutionaries." Into battle, thus exhorted, went the Chinese
millions to wage war on the lowly sparrow.
At dawn one day last week, the slaughter of the sparrows in Peking
began, continuing a campaign that has been going on in the countryside
for months. The objection to the sparrows is that, like the rest of
China's inhabitants, they are hungry. They are accused of pecking away
at supplies in warehouses and in paddyfields at an officially
estimated rate of four pounds of grain per sparrow per year. And so
divisions of soldiers deployed through Peking streets, their footfalls
muffled by rubber-soled sneakers. Students and civil servants in high-
collared tunics, and schoolchildren carrying pots and pans, ladles and
spoons, quietly took up their stations. The total force, according to
Radio Peking, numbered 3,000,000.
At 5 a.m. bugles sounded, cymbals crashed, whistles trilled. The
massed students beat their kitchenware and advanced, as Radio Peking
recounted, singing a rousing, revolutionary anthem: "Arise, arise, Oh
millions with one heart; braving the enemy's fire, march on."
The massive extirpation force netted and scatter-gunned the exhausted
birds or snared them with long, gum-tipped bamboo poles. At last
report 310,000 sparrows had fallen in Peking alone, and an estimated
4,000,000 throughout the rest of Red China. The national hero was Yang
Seh-mun, 16, of Yunnan. He had killed 20,000 sparrows by sneaking
around during the day locating nesting trees. At night, China Youth
proudly reported, he then climbed trees and strangled whole families
of sparrows with his bare hands.
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thanks owed to baphomet
.
...the locusts noisily thanked us and turned their jaws toward our
crops, swallowing our greed whole...
http://www.metafilter.com/65987/the-locusts-noisily-thanked-us-and-turned-their-jaws-toward-our-crops-swallowing-our-greed-whole
BY baphomet / October 29, 2007
"In 1958, Chairman Mao started a war. His foe: millions of hungry
animals across China, particularly the sparrow. Villages and cities
were mobilized to execute the birds en masse. Their crime: pecking
away at fields and storehouses, stealing precious grain from the
mouths of China's masses. Entire families brandished pots, pans, and
other weapons of cacophonous warfare to panic the birds into forced
flight, causing millions of them to drop from the skies.
The sparrows, it was discovered, could sustain no more than a minute
or so of continuous flight without dying of fatigue- this technique,
along with firing squads and nest destruction, killed an estimated 4
million or more sparrows.
The sparrow war backfired, however. By the time it was realized that
the sparrow consumed primarily insects, not grain, the locust
population had already spiraled out of control. This event, along with
other causes culminated in the deaths of 30 million people as famine
unfolded across the land from 1959-1961. This was just one of the many
disastrous initiatives of Mao's Great Leap Forward."
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OTHER CAUSES
http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/past/chinese.htm
http://www.res.org.uk/society/mediabriefings/pdfs/2000/January/yang3.pdf
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PICTURES
http://www.kkxx365.com/bbs/2006-8/7/8191128617.html
http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_08.jpg
http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_07.jpg
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ELIMINATE THE FOUR PESTS (1958)
http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/sih.html
http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/images/sih01.jpg
Children were given a real role in the posters that flanked the
campaign that set out to exterminate the so-called four pests. The aim
of this large scale hygiene campaign, which started in earnest in 1958
and is often seen as an overture for nationwide mobilization of the
Great Leap Forward, was to eliminate flies, mosquitoes, rats and
sparrows. Sparrows were later replaced by bed bugs, as their
extermination upset the ecological balance, and bugs destroyed crops
as a result of the absence of natural predators.
To attain the aim of the elimination of the four pests, everybody was
mobilized. Contests were held among enterprises, government agencies
and schools in cleanliness. Non-material rewards were given to those
who handed in the most tails of rats, or dead flies and mosquitoes, or
dead sparrows. As the movement became something of a sport, children
turned out to be a group that jumped at the excitement of these
activities, and were eminently receptive to the calls for
mobilization. Eyewitnesses recall from their youth how they would bang
pots and pans so that sparrows would not have the chance to rest on
tree branches, and would fall dead from the sky from exhaustion.
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BAD INTELLIGENCE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_sparrow_campaign
http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htm
The Chinese Sparrow War of 1958
BY Sha Yexin / August 31, 1997
Any living organism cannot avoid disasters and catastrophes, no
matter whether it is a rat scurrying across the street, a fly hitting
the wall, a dog losing its home, a rabbit having its warren destroyed,
an ant crawling in a hot pot, a fish in a dried pond, a turtle trapped
in a jar or a lamb in the tiger's jaws. But none have ever
encountered a disaster on the scale of that which fell upon the
Chinese sparrows in 1958. That catastrophe was practically almost
enough to extinct the species. The disaster was not a natural one;
rather, it was a man-made one. In the entire history of sparrows
around the world, they have never been embroiled in a people's war as
they were in China in 1958.
In the history of people's wars in China, there are two
extraordinary episodes. In the first war, the superbly equipped 8-
million-strong Kuomintang army was slowly chewed up by the small
caliber rifles of the Communists. The second war was the 1958 war
against the sparrows in China. On December 13, 1958, in Shanghai
alone, the most primitive weapons were used to destroy almost 200,000
sparrows. How many across the nation in total? Probably at least 8
million? What do you think about the human's ability to conduct war?
Let use look at the Shanghai newspaper on that day. The headline
was, "The whole city is attacking the sparrows." The news story was
quite lively, so that we can still feel the heat of the battle when we
read it today.
"On the early morning of December 13, the citywide battle to
destroy the sparrows began. In large and small streets, red flags
were waving. On the buildings and in the courtyards, open spaces,
roads and rural farm fields, there were numerous scarecrows, sentries,
elementary and middle school students, government office employees,
factory workers, farmers and People's Liberation Army shouting their
war cries. In the Xincheng district, they produced more than 80,000
scarecrows and more than 100,000 colorful flags overnight. The
residents of Xietu road, Xuhui district and Yangpu road Yulin district
also produced a large number of motion scarecrows. In the city and
the outskirts, almost half of the labor force was mobilized into the
anti-sparrow army. Usually, the young people were responsible for
trapping, poisoning and attacking the sparrows while the old people
and the children kept sentry watch. The factories in the city
committed themselves into the war effort even as they guaranteed that
they would maintain production levels. In the parks, cemeteries and
nurseries (of young plants) where there are fewer people around, 150
free-fire zones were set up for shooting the sparrows. The Nanyang
Girls Middle School rifle team received training in the techniques of
shooting birds. Thus the citizens fought a total war against the
sparrows. By 8pm tonight, it is estimated that a total of 194,432
sparrows have been killed."
I went back to read my diary back then. In 1958, I went with the
Department of Chinese at the Huadong Normal University to Commune
Number 4 in Huating town, Jiading county for revolutionary education.
I was living in Hujia village. On December 13, my diary entry was:
"The city government decided to kill the sparrows today, including in
the rural outskirts. In the morning, we were divided into the three
teams to fight the war. In the afternoon, we were also divided into
teams to fight the war." In retrospect, it would seem that I was
being very sketchy about a great historical episode, and therefore I
have let history down. As I recalled, my fellow students and I
climbed onto some tall trees on the side of the road and banged our
gongs, drums, washbasins and anything else that can make loud noises.
The sparrows were forced to keep flying until they dropped dead from
fatigue. If the millions of dead sparrows had been autopsied, I dare
say that 90% of them died from sudden cardiac arrest (from fatigue or
fright).
Just as the three great battles in the war of liberation were
personally ordered and directed by the Great Leader, this people's war
against the sparrows was also personally ordered and directed by his
esteemed self. Between March and May, 1958, he conducted central
government work conferences in Chengdu, Wuhan and Guangzhou and also
at the Second Plenum of the Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist
Party, he called for the eradication of the sparrows, one of the four
pests. He said: "Here is the method -- we make our resolution, we
coordinate our actions, we divide our tasks, we cut off the food
supply, we set up a trap and we continue our battle of destruction."
Physical force needed to be complemented by propaganda tools to
motivate the people. Thus, he wanted people to write many folk
songs. I tend to think that writing folk songs is just as well-
intentioned as the war against the sparrows. Concerning these folk
songs, he said: "Everyone will be given three or five pieces of paper
for them to write folk songs. We have more than 90,000 towns around
China. If each town can publish one collection of folk songs, we
would have 90,000 different books. In order to surpass our quota, our
school leaders even asked us to write at least 10 folks songs a day!
If they can grow 10,000 jin of crops on one mu of land during the
Great Leap Forward, then why can't you write ten folk songs a day?
Fine. Let's write; if you can't, then you must make something up. So
I made up this song on the day of the war against the sparrows.
"The entire people is mobilized together. The sparrows have
been wiped out, the mosquitoes have fled to Fujian while the flies are
hiding in Guangdong."
There is obviously some element of local protectionism in that.
Frankly speaking, it deserved to be criticized.
This disaster against the sparrows was finally terminated in 1959
when the Academy of Sciences leaders brought up the opinions of
scientists such as Zhu Xi and Zheng Zuoxin. The scientists had
autopsied the digestive systems of the sparrows and found that three-
quarters of the contents were harmful insects and only one-quarter was
human food. This showed that sparrows were basically a beneficial
bird.
Sparrows have flaws just like intellectuals. When they jump on
the flagstaff, they look self-important. They also like to chirp when
they are in charge, just like intellectuals like to talk. They are
also disinterested in politics and lack deep visions, as they are just
happy with a home. But ultimately sparrows can catch harmful insects
and fulfill their functions, just as intellectuals can toil honestly
and do what they are good at. So their contributions are greater than
their flaws, say in a 30%/70% ratio. Although the sparrow is tiny, it
has all the body organs and it is also an essential member of the
ecology. So how could we butcher them? There may a few misbehaving
individuals, but that is just a very small number for which there is
no reason to mobilize the entire population to eradicate the entire
species.
Last year was the thirtieth anniversary of the Cultural
Revolution. This year is the fortieth anniversary of the Anti-
Rightist campaign. Both of these events passed by quietly in this
peaceful atmosphere. Next year will be the fortieth anniversary of
the Great Sparrow Disaster. Can we commemorate it from either the
viewpoint of protecting the ecological environment or making policies
on the basis of democracy and scientific data? History should not be
forgotten!
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FANTASY INCARNATE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Chinese_Famine
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/960314/china.shtml
China's Great Leap Forward
BY William Harms / March 14, 1996
As a child growing up in rural China, Dali Yang, Assistant Professor
in Political Science, heard the stories of his parents and others
about the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, a time of suffering for
China that came soon after the Communist revolution in 1949.
"My parents were peasants who worked in the field. We grew wheat in
the area where I lived, and they were part of a production team," said
Yang, who was born in 1964, three years after the Great Leap Forward
had ended. "They would often bring up the topic of the Great Leap
famine and tell how bad things were during that time."
Yang's curiosity about the period led him to write the book Calamity
and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change
Since the Great Leap Famine, to be published this spring by Stanford
University Press. The book, one of the first major works to analyze
the period, relates how the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent
famine still influence China today.
Unlike the later Cultural Revolution, which is well known in the West,
the Great Leap Forward has been less of a focus for research by
Western scholars -- yet, according to Yang, it was one of the most
influential periods of Chinese history. It was the pivotal event that
led China to adopt reforms in rural areas after Mao's death in 1976,
resulting in the dismantlement of the people's communes that the
Chinese government had fervently advocated during the Great Leap
Forward.
Communist dream leads to mass death
The Great Leap Forward was begun in 1957 by Chairman Mao Zedong to
bring the nation quickly into the forefront of economic development.
Mao wanted China to become a leading industrial power, and to
accomplish his goals he and his colleagues pushed for the construction
of steel plants across the country.
The rural society was to keep pace with the dream by producing enough
food to feed the country plus enough for export to help pay for
industrialization. As a result of the Communist revolution, landowners
had been stripped of their property, and by 1957 peasants already were
forced to work in agricultural cooperatives.
These changes were intended to improve conditions for everyone by
collectivizing agriculture and establishing communal eating facilities
where peasants could eat all they wanted free of charge. This utopian
dream turned into a nightmare as the central leadership grew
increasingly out of touch with reality, Yang found through his study
of government records and personal accounts.
At the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, Mao proclaimed that China
would overtake Britain in production of steel and other products
within 15 years. Other Chinese leaders, including Deng Xiaoping,
supported Mao's enthusiasm, according to documents Yang studied in
China.
A year later, Mao radically revised the time-line for catching up to
Britain -- what was to be accomplished in 15 years now had to be done
in just one more year, he said.
"Frequent changes in the timetable were symptomatic of the Great Leap,
which, in retrospect, was fantasy incarnate. Even more exaggerated
targets were subsequently presented, and then frequently revised
upward, for steel, grain, cotton and other products. Any semblance of
serious planning was abandoned," Yang said.
In pursuit of its goals, the government executed people who did not
agree with the pace of radical change. The crackdown led to the deaths
of 550,000 people by 1958.
The government also plunged the country into a deep debt by increasing
spending on the development of heavy industry. Government spending on
heavy industry grew in 1958 to represent 56 percent of state capital
investment, an increase from 38 percent in 1956.
People were mobilized to accomplish the goals of industrialization.
They built backyard furnaces for iron and steel and worked together on
massive building projects, including one undertaken during the winter
of 1957-58 in which more than 100 million peasants were mobilized to
build large-scale water-conservation works.
Local leaders competed with one another to see who could create the
most activity. In the rush to recruit labor, agricultural tasks were
neglected, sometimes leaving the grain harvest to rot in the fields,
Yang said. In the frenzy of competition, the leaders over-reported
their harvests to their superiors in Beijing, and what was thought to
be surplus grain was sold abroad.
Although in theory the country was awash in grain, in reality it was
not. Rural communal mess halls were encouraged to supply food for
free, but by the spring of 1959, the grain reserves were exhausted and
the famine had begun.
No one is sure exactly how many people perished as a result of the
spreading hunger. By comparing the number of deaths that could be
expected under normal conditions with the number that occurred during
the period of the Great Leap famine, scholars have estimated that
somewhere between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the
experiment came to an end in 1961, making the Great Leap famine the
largest in world history.
People abandoned their homes in search of food. Families suffered
immensely, and reports of that suffering reached the members of the
army, whose homes were primarily in rural areas. As soldiers received
letters describing the suffering and the deaths, it became harder for
leaders to maintain ideological discipline. Chaos developed in the
countryside as rural militias became predatory, seizing grain, beating
people and raping women.
>From famine to reform
During the struggle for survival, farmers in nearly one-third of the
rural communities took matters into their own hands, abandoning the
people's commune in favor of individual farming. Heavy central control
was reduced, and the country's agricultural production improved.
Following Mao's death in 1976, central leaders disagreed over rural
policies. Taking advantage of this policy paralysis, peasants and
local cadres made alliances in those areas that had suffered severely
from the Great Leap Famine and contracted land to the farm household.
In just a few years' time, the people's communes were dismantled.
Agricultural performance improved dramatically and gave momentum to
the reforms under Deng.
The memory of the famine reinforced the important role peasants play
in China's development, Yang said. That memory also has undermined the
appeal of central planning in rural policy-making.
"Historical developments during more than four decades of Communist
rule in China have again and again shown us how the unanticipated
consequences of elite policies subverted their attempts at fundamental
social engineering," Yang writes in Calamity and Reform in China.
Institutional changes in China are the result of a contest between the
elite and the masses, between the state and the society, he said.
"This study thus points to the crucial importance of guarding against
those who claim to know some magic route to the radiant future, be
they politicians like Mao or party intellectuals who supported Mao or
the new technocrats who claim to have found a scientific way to make
China rich and powerful and who happily clamor for more power for
themselves."
The best way to prevent the country from following another movement
like the Great Leap Forward is to create mechanisms that check those
in power, Yang said.
"Had there been a free press and other institutions of oversight that
are commonly found in open political systems, the Great Leap famine
would certainly not have attained the magnitude it did," said Yang,
who continues to follow events in China through visits there as he
develops his academic career in the United States.
Yang became interested in the social sciences as a college student in
Beijing, where he studied engineering. He received his B.S. in
industrial engineering in 1983 from Beijing University of Science and
Technology and developed an interest in English, which led him to
receive his diploma for advanced studies in English in 1984 from
Beijing Foreign Studies University.
He came to the United States to pursue graduate studies in political
science in 1986 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1993, the
same year he joined the Chicago faculty.
Although he does not see rapid democratization coming to China, he has
noticed some indications of ways in which the system there is
beginning to rein in the excess power of overzealous leaders. "To some
extent the trend toward decentralization, market-based competition and
legal rule has spread decision-making power throughout the system," he
said.
The new leadership is, however, "tentative, reactive and at times
schizophrenic," Yang said. "They are less driven by firm ideological
convictions than by sheer desire to remain in power.
"The balance between the state and society thus appears precarious,
but it is also less susceptible to elite manipulations and more likely
to produce policies dealing with the concrete problems that crop up in
a state that is undergoing rapid economic development and social
change."
http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-Famine/dp/0805056688/ref=sr_1_2/103-4661362-5998237?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194565641&sr=1-2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book)
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TRIBUTE ALBUM
http://www.amazon.com/Every-Red-Heart-Shines-Toward/dp/B000H0MMBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IaKN3fSLcA
"In 2006, instrumental post-rock band Red Sparowes released a stunning
album, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun, inspired by these
events. The song titles of the album comprise a poem about the
inspiration for the album:
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 upon us 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 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."