The first Five Year Plan had relied mainly on Soviet assistance to construct massive Soviet-style factories, foundries and so on, all built with essentially slave labour. However, for the Great Leap Forward, Mao got it into his head that the Chinese should do all these things completely from scratch. This inconceivable moron actually ordered the peasants, most of whom were barely educated, to start smelting steel in their homes. Each family was tasked to produce a certain tonnage of steel, without being provided with any raw materials, any equipment, or even the most basic instruction in metallurgy.

Whether out of a sense of duty or fear, the Chinese peasants complied and started building crude stone kilns in their back yards. Now, it turns out that modern steel production is in fact a highly complex, laborious process. The peasants never got anywhere near meeting their absurd quotas, and the steel they did produce was of such poor quality as to be utterly useless.

The big-brained Communist tampered around with agriculture too and came to the perfectly ignorant but quintessentially Marxist conclusion that household vermin are agents of capitalism. Yes, like capitalists, they exploit the labour of the proletariat and therefore must be totally eradicated. And by far the worst of all these bourgeoisie oppressors was, naturally, that most vile and heinous creature, the sparrow…

As part of the “Smash Sparrow Campaign,” children were enlisted to bang pots and pans around, chasing the sparrows out of their nests. Later, adults knocked the nests out of the trees and crushed the eggs underneath their sandals, until there were almost no sparrows left in all of China… Within a year of the “Smash Sparrow Campaign,” itself part of the larger “Four Pests Campaign,” the locust population exploded and did what locusts do best. The Communists had played God and literally created a Biblical plague.