China - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 249

The People's Republic built thousands of steel mills, cement plants, oil
refineries, and chemical factories. Coal production more than doubled.
The government constructed hundreds of electric generating plants,
almost all coal fired. All this was hard on the environment, with no laws
against air and water pollution.
In 1958 Mao Zedong decided that the first Five-Year Plan was not mov-
ing China ahead fast enough and that the people were capable of much
more. The second Five-Year Plan was known as the Great Leap Forward.
Life in the countryside was even more regimented. Twelve families formed
a work group, and 12 work groups formed a brigade. Party officials super-
vised everything. The peasants ate in village mess halls. Their young
children and elderly parents were put in day care so all adults and older
children could work in the fields. Propaganda played from morning to
night on loud speakers. The peasants attended party-run meetings.
Quotas for wheat and rice were raised. For a while, the peasants could lie
about their success in production, but eventually they were discovered.
A famous project was to smelt iron in backyard furnaces in the villages.
At the high point, there were 600,000 of them. However, it soon became
apparent that the quality of the iron was low, and they burned valuable
trees for fuel. Industrial output of regular steel mills and factories for
heavy machinery was of low quality also. During the first year, rainfall
was abundant, but the following 2 years were dry, so crops failed. Food
was scarce, and people went hungry. As many as 20 million people starved
to death. To make matters worse, the Soviet Union quarreled with China,
and withdrew its thousands of engineers and experts.
One of the stranger features of the Great Leap Forward was the Kill a
Sparrow Campaign, which Mao personally instigated. The concern was
that sparrows ate grain, so fewer sparrows would mean more grain. People
were instructed to kill the birds with sticks and slingshots and to bang
on pots and pans so the sparrows would fly away or die from exhaustion.
They were to hunt for nests and squash the eggs or kill the fledglings. The
campaign was successful in that it killed almost all the sparrows in China,
but since they eat insects, it allowed mosquitoes to multiply. Only many
years later did the sparrow population recover.
With the obvious failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao stepped
down as head of the state, although he kept his more important position
as head of the Communist Party. His replacements leading the govern-
ment on a day-to-day basis, such as Deng Xiaoping, followed a moderate