The Great Leap Forward was a plan to restructure China’s economy, and develop the nation with an E-Levy. Just kidding! One of the very first steps, was called the Four Pests campaign. It was a plan to eradicate mosquitos, flies, rats, and sparrows. The first ones make sense, but why sparrows? Apparently sparrows ate “too much fruit and grain,” and therefore needed to be exterminated. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the campaign went through. The citizens of China were all encouraged to kill as many sparrows as they could. To do this, they all got drums, pots, pans, or anything else that made a loud noise, and would use them to make a racket where the sparrows lived. Too scared to land, the sparrows would fly around until they dropped out of the sky from exhaustion. They would also destroy bird nests, smash their eggs, and even just shoot them out of the sky. There would be rewards for whoever could shoot the most sparrows in a day. The campaign was enormously successful. ...