In 1958, Mao Zedong declared war on the sparrows. Sparrows ate grain while it ripened in the fields, depriving the people of the fruits of their labor. For this reason they were one of four species, along with rats, mosquitoes, and flies, targeted for elimination. The campaign against them was massive and total. Sparrows were shot out of the air by the thousands. Their nests were smashed, eggs broken, and chicks killed. Children helped by hunting them with slings. In coordinated attempts to scare the sparrows from descending from the air, whole towns marched into the countryside banging gongs, beating drums, and setting off fireworks. Exhausted, eventually they dropped dead from the sky.

Soon, breathless statistics about the campaign's success were sent to Mao’s retreat in the Forbidden City. In one day, the people of Shanghai killed 194,432 sparrows. Over the course of the year, they killed more than a million. Across China, sparrows were driven nearly to extinction. Only then did the scope of Mao’s mistake become clear, for sparrows ate insects as well as grain. When locusts started devastating crops in 1960, the sparrows were pardoned for their crimes. Bedbugs took their place on the list of people’s enemies.

With its utopian ambition, mass enthusiasm, sudden reversals, and deluded goals, the Anti-Sparrow campaign captured the madness of the Great Leap Forward in miniature. The sparrow campaign doesn’t explicitly feature in The Four Books, Yan Lianke’s new novel about Mao’s attempt to transform his country from an agrarian one into a socialist one, but sparrows do—their appearance serving as a kind of harbinger for a new stage in an escalating calamity.

The book is set among a group of disgraced intellectuals interred in a re-education camp called the 99th district. Located in an arid part of Henan Province in central China, the camp doesn’t need walls to contain the inmates, since all the surrounding communities are also camps, full of watchful inmates who have been promised freedom if they catch an escapee. As The Four Books progresses, the intellectuals, who are identified only by the names of their former professions (Musician, Scholar, Author, Technician, Theologian), are made to participate in every successive campaign of the Great Leap Forward.

The sparrows first show up early on, looking in vain for a place to perch in a barren landscape. (The land has been stripped of vegetation by the Backyard Furnace Campaign—an effort to turn every villager into an ironworker that required the cutting down of countless trees to fuel the furnaces.) Later, the sparrows threaten a field of wheat planted by one of the novel’s protagonists, an inmate who has been promised freedom if he can grow “ears of wheat as large as ears of corn,” a local version of the “Sputnik Field”—a program that was supposed to revolutionize Chinese agriculture through a combination of deep furrowing and close planting. Communes reported astronomical gains in productivity. In reality, crops rotted in the fields.