I’ve read “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikötter, but it’s been a while. Wikipedia [1] captures every contributing cause, but I’d emphasise the illusion of superabundance, which was essentially local government exaggerating the size of their harvests to make themselves look good to Beijing. Their province then had to export the entire harvest to cover their lies. Incompetent government was the major cause either way.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine#Causes_...

This is a core reason many are freaked out by too much government.

If a company screws up. It goes out of business. Others will take its place. If a government screws up, oh well.

Companies screwing up has caused way more harm than gov. Bhopal, lead gasoline, asbestos, tobacco industry, strike busting layoffs company towns, oil spills, ozone hole, greenhouse gases. On and on.

Anyone who thinks gov is the enemy has been bamboozooled by corporate propaganda.

>Anyone who thinks gov is the enemy has been bamboozooled by corporate propaganda.

This is how we get starving people and hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. Because the government repossess farms and gives the farm land to people who don't know or don't care about farming. The lack of food forces the "good" government to import food by printing money. Since the excess money is not being invested into food production it is causing stagflation and since the obligation to import food never goes away the rate of printing has to keep going up which ultimately results in hyperinflation.

If anything, governments are fully responsible for causing bad incentives and encouraging destructive behavior by companies. It's absolutely laughable that people think that setting the wrong incentives should be compensated by cooperative goodwill of 7 billion people when greed is a much more effective way of achieving good outcomes if the incentives are right. Especially since there aren't 7 billion selfless people on the planet.

They are both collections of flawed humans. Accountability is necessary regardless of the collective noun you use.

From the accounts I've read, I think the sparrows thing was more of a symbol of what happened in the culture and an exemplar of the Party's thinking than the linchpin in the ecology they're often portrayed as.