The Coronavirus pandemic has made the highly repulsive Wuhan wet market that sells all kinds of meat known all over the world. But it is said that the Chinese started ‘eating anything that moves’ after the great famine of 1958. The Chinese government allowed people to even poach wild animals and eat them.
The real cause of the great famine of 1958 is the quixotic move of Chairman Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China. The Communist Party government under him launched ‘Great Sparrow Campaign’ to eliminate sparrows in the country, for he thought the bird was a nuisance as it ate away all farm produce. People were mobilised and in one year more than 600 million sparrows were killed.
The anti-sparrow drive was part of the Four Pests Campaign launched under Mao’s ambitious Great Leap Forward campaign launched between 1958 and 1962 to make China a most developed country. The anti-sparrow campaign had a disastrous consequence. The pest and locust population exploded since there was no sparrow to eat them. Foodgrain production fell and as a result in the next three years, estimated 45 million people died of famine.
The Chinese administration or the Communist Party had swept the subject under the carpet. A book on the famine, Tombstone, by journalist Yang Jisheng was banned in China. His book estimated that 36 million people died. People People cannibalised people; parents ate their children. Men killed and ate their aged parents. People invaded forests and killed all kinds of animals and consumed them.
Besides famine, other factors were also killing people. In the name of Cultural Revolution, lakhs of people were incarcerated and killed.
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