this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
37 points (89.4% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
670 readers
31 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's looked at with hindsight. At the time sparrows weren't thought to be a major part of the ecosystem and were thought to mostly eat seeds. We now know that they were insectivores, but only partially due to the GLF. Had any other nation at the time undergone a national pest eradication campaign, they likely would've targeted sparrows as well.
You are right that that was the common belief, but it was long known that ecosystems are delicate things and carrying out such a campaign without so much as a test run on a smaller portion of the country to observe the impact was irresponsible. It was a case of Mao's genuine faith in the people backfiring due to not always being tempered by the "scientific" part of "scientific socialism".
"Sparrows can fly,"
Yeah, test results would not be 1:1 with a wider-scale implementation, but it surely would have still shown bugs getting out of hand, even if to a lesser extent.
That's true, their methodology was flawed as well. I get a sense that there was a sense of desperation at the time, that they felt they needed to industrialize ASAP and rushed a lot of processes instead of examining them to make sure they would work as intended.
there was such a feeling, and the idea that they could double iron production in such short time (which was absurd, and something other people better informed about the economy, like zhou enlai, did insist on saying before 1958) is pretty illustrative of that
i really like mao and i agree with a lot of what he wrote, he's probably the most important marxist for my own views after marx and lenin. but i think starting from 1956 he unfortunately kind of let idealism take too much of his views on development