Mao's Bird Fetish

Chairman Mao has been dead for forty-one years. China's glittering shopping malls, high-speed trains, ultra-modern skyscrapers, super highways, and expansive airports have transformed the Middle Kingdom into a workers' paradise. Mao Tse-Tung's statue overlooks Tiananmen Square with stern serenity. His followers praise him every May Day, but nothing can stop the birds from shitting on the Great Leader.

They want revenge, for in April 1958 Mao declared birds to be enemies of the state.

Especially sparrows.

To Mao birds symbolized freedom from authority and the Chairman urged his people to bang on pots to prevent the sparrows from landing to rest. They died in the millions and the crop output increased to meet party demands. The only problem was that the sparrows controlled the insect population and the next season the locusts ravaged the harvest. More than 30 million starved to death during the Great Leap Forward.

In the end Mao recognized his error and quietly pardoned the surviving sparrows.

Their population quickly recovered from the slaughter.

The Chinese people took a little longer, but they had learned their lesson.

"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery." Mao Tse-Tung

And China was not for the birds.

The Mao is an endangered species on the Samoan Islands. Little is known about its feeding and breeding habits.

"The idea that the state mistakenly took too much grain from the countryside because it assumed that the harvest was much larger than it was is largely a myth – at most partially true for the autumn of 1958 only. In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death. At a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai dated March 25, 1959, Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all the grain, much more than had ever been the case. At the meeting he announced that 'When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.'" [47]