S8 Ep1124: Mao's War on Sparrows and Australia's Emu Conflict Guest: Stephen Moss Book Title: Ten Birds That Changed the World In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered the eradication of the tree sparrow as part of his "Four Pests" campaign, believing it would save grain. The ma
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Mao's War on Sparrows and Australia's Emu Conflict Guest: Stephen Moss Book Title: Ten Birds That Changed the World In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered the eradication of the tree sparrow as part of his "Four Pests" campaign, believing it would save grain. The mass slaughter — carried out by citizens banging pots until birds dropped dead from exhaustion — caused an ecological disaster. Without sparrows to eat them, insect populations exploded and consumed the harvests, leading to a famine that killed up to 50 million people. Scientists like Tso-hsin Cheng who tried to warn Mao were persecuted, and China was eventually forced to import sparrows from the Soviet Union to restore the ecosystem. In a lighter but equally revealing tale, Moss recounts Australia's 1932 Emu War, where the military failed to cull 20,000 emus with machine guns. The emus used tactical "guerrilla" maneuvers to outwit the soldiers, proving that human attempts to militarily intervene in nature often end in humiliation or catastrophe. (7)
1914 EMPEROR PENGUIN
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm John Batchel with the very generous Stephen Moss, the BBC producer and author of Ten |
| 0:11.5 | Birds that Changed the World. |
| 0:13.8 | This next story took my breath away. |
| 0:17.0 | It's about something humble called the sparrow. |
| 0:20.1 | We have sparrows everywhere. They sing. |
| 0:23.2 | This is the tree sparrow. And it's the tree sparrow of Asia, the tree sparrow of China, the People's Republic of China. |
| 0:31.6 | In December of 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, declared four vermin's must be wiped out. |
| 0:42.1 | Rodents, mosquitoes, flies, and the tree sparrow. What follows is astonishing. |
| 0:50.9 | Stephen, I want to make sure, rodents, mosquitoes, flies flies and sparrows, they're not the same thing. |
| 0:57.0 | But focusing on the sparrow, what kind of sparrow? |
| 1:00.0 | What did it look like? |
| 1:01.5 | It's a bird actually found in Britain. |
| 1:04.0 | We are used to the house sparrow, which you, of course, have in the United States, because it was brought there by mistake. |
| 1:09.4 | This is a close relative to that. |
| 1:11.3 | It's not related to the American sparrows really. |
| 1:13.9 | It's a seed-eating bird. |
| 1:15.1 | It was very common in China in rural and urban areas. |
| 1:19.6 | Now what you have to remember about Chairman Mao is even compared to other dictators |
| 1:25.4 | like Stalin and Hitler and dare I say certain former US presidents. |
| 1:30.9 | One of the problems with Mao is that he had absolute power. |
| 1:36.7 | I mean all dictators are powerful but he took it to a different level. |
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