September 16, 2025 • 38 mins
Say one thing about Mao's communist China, they could kill some sparrows. Learn why and how in today's episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.
It's just us and that's okay because we are going
to do our best today pronouncing Chinese words, which is
always a laugh riot. If you're a fan of the.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Podcast, Yeah, you can take those, my friend, because I'm
meant to look up the pronunciations and I didn't get
a chance to. But this topic about the four pests
campaign comes to you from listener, actually non listener, Emily Bryant,
my wife, No nice. She gave me the idea and
I was like, oh yeah, I looked into a little bit.
It's like, yeah, this will be good.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
That's funny. I wondered if you had thought of it
because of you killing the cockroach recently on air.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
No, but I do have to say you judge me
pretty hard on the cockroach, and while just very casually
talking about how much you would kill a mosquito and
ticks and flees, but oh not the cockroach, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
No, was I a little harsh?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I'm sorry, No, you weren't harsh, but I was like,
wait a minute, you're killing three out of fourties and
acting like you're, you know, gods get the insects.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, my boundaries apply to all. Yeah, okay, we're not
talking about cockroaches yet, we're talking about rats, mosquitoes, flies.
I have an issue with rats, but I get where
they're coming from. And sparrows. These were the four pests
(01:39):
that made up of the Four Pests campaign carried out
at the end of the fifties beginning of the nineteen
sixties in communist China, which newspapers at the time called
Red China. And it was an enormously successful communist eradication
campaign that was bent on controlling nature. And did it
(02:00):
ever work.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yeah, I mean successful in one way, very destructive in another.
And we'll get to all that. Obviously, we're talking about
the leader at the time, mal Zedong, And this had
was not the first time something like this had been tried,
and it's been tried since then over there as well.
In the nineteen twenties and thirties. In China, they had
fly killing campaigns. In mid nineteen twenties, it was a
(02:26):
fly campaign such that the Southeast University in Nanjing was
it was very effective and they were you know, this
is very much like anecdotal, like there were practically no
flies there all summer. Yeah, but apparently it worked pretty good.
And then they did this at other times in the
nineteen twenties and thirties where they were incentivized, like middle
(02:46):
schoolers to go out and kill flies and bring them
in and show them to their teachers and like a
little matchbox, let's say, and things like that. But apparently
that resulted in more than ten million dead flies. So
there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, so much so that I actually saw a contemporaneous
newspaper account that was talking about the Four Pests campaign
when it kicked off, and the newspapers is an American
newspaper just kind of chied it and said the fact
that they're having to include flies belies the boasts that
there were no flies in China. So apparently after these
(03:22):
eradication campaigns, I told the rest of the world, we
don't have flies anymore, suckers, because we get rid of it.
We takes care of business, I think, is how they
put it.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah, the Four Pests that we need to sort of
set the stage because it's kind of rooted in the
Great Leap Forward and that was a very ambitious campaign
in nineteen fifty eight January nineteen fifty eight that had
a lot of initiatives, but the real goal, the kind
of stated goal, was to industrialize and to overtake the
UK's industrial output in less than fifteen years, mainly in
(03:57):
There are lots of ways they wanted to do this,
but mainly to outdo them and steel production.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, and just a quick reminder, the UK is where
the industrial revolution began. So this was beyond ambitious for China,
especially from the place that they were coming from. So
MAO was extremely ambitious, I guess. And to do something
like this that required really huge, sweeping changes and for
(04:25):
them to happen immediately. You weren't transitioning into anything. It
was stop doing this and start doing this.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, like stop farming and build a steel furnace in
your backyard and start smelting. Was tried new weird sort
of farming techniques that weren't tested. It was. It was
a pretty enthusiastic campaign, you know, from the people, just
how they received it and how they got into it.
Apparently that farmers sometimes or people would just work late
(04:55):
into the night and they called it catching the moon
and stars and public officials were they would issue these
steel and grain quotas to like, you know, make as
much steel and grow as much grain as you could.
But they were very unrealistic quotas. They were not able
to fulfill those, and in that time, with you know,
this sort of idealistic, authoritative approach to government, they were
(05:18):
over reporting output. And as we'll see, that kind of
happened again with a four pest campaign.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, that was an enormous problem that China ran into,
and almost immediately after they began the four Pest campaign,
and even though they were kind of parallel to one another,
they were definitely intertwined at least to some degree. Right, Yeah,
So the four Pest campaign itself, you might say, like, Okay,
China's trying to industrialize and catch up to the UK,
(05:47):
who cares about flies and sparrows? And it turns out
that Mao cared a lot about flies and sparrows and
other pests. He and I've noticed this before, and a
lot of the stuff he talked about, he almost had
like a contempt for nature and a real like inner
desire to dominate nature and bend it to human will,
(06:09):
to his will. At least he had a slogan called
man Must Conquer Nature. Yeah, pretty on the nose, right, Yeah.
And also apparently he was quoted back in nineteen fifty
eight that he wanted to make the high mountain bow
its head, make the river yield the way, and so
this really kind of tied these eradication campaigns. And make
(06:30):
no mistake, the point was to get rid of every fly,
every rat, every mosquito, and every sparrow in all of China.
So this eradication campaign really kind of fit into that
viewpoint that he held.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, for sure, So there was some megalomania involved, for sure,
but it definitely had genuine roots and amibition to be
to get rid of disease, to stop these contagions from spreading,
because they were out of a decade in the nineteen
forties where they had smallpox and cholera and malaria and
(07:07):
the infant mortality rate was like thirty percent. So there
was definitely you know, they reacted with these big, large
scale vaccination drives, sanitation initiatives, but getting rid of these
pests they thought could get rid of the things that
were causing these diseases to begin with. Yeah, and getting
rid of these pests, and three of the cases would
(07:27):
get rid of these diseases to begin with. In the
case of sparrows, they're not spreading disease, but he sparrows
are grain thieves. They eat grain, and so they had
these wild estimates that sparrows could, like the food they
lost to grain by sparrows could feed up to sixty
thousand people. So that's why they were on the list.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yes, somehow they calculated that each sparrow stole in eight
about four and a half kilograms a year, which equals
to about ten pounds, which is a staging amount of
grain for one single bird to steal from, like right
out of the Chinese people's mouths. So that was why
(08:09):
sparrow's were on there. You might have been sitting here
the whole time, going, what are you talking about with
sparrow's the little bird, They're the greatest of all birds potentially,
why would you want to kill sparrows? And sparrows just
got wrapped up into this big drag night essentially.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, along with other birds by accident, of course.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yes, so the whole thing was essentially like an adopt
a mile program, except with killing animals.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yeah, I mean they had sanitation teams that people would
organize in communities. They would go out together and hunt rats.
They encourage kids, of course to do this, but just individually,
they were encouraging people like, hey, kill every mosquito you
can find, kill every fly that comes near you. It's
your patriotic duty to do so. They would incentivize and
(08:55):
reward people sometimes, but usually it was just like, this
is something you need to get on board with.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Make us all healthier, exactly, And going back to that
infant mortality rate, talking about making them healthier, like, this
is where they were coming from. That thirty percent. The
way that it's expressed typically is number of deaths per
one thousand berths, So that's three hundred deaths per one
thousand berths. So this was an staggering infant mortality rate
(09:22):
that they were dealing with, and it kind of drives
home like, Okay, this was even more ambitious than it
seems on its face, because not only are they trying
to leap forward, they're really having to come from a
deficit to even begin to leap.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah, for sure, And of course in communists China, how
are you going to get this ball rolling through government propaganda?
It was a big, big part of mobilizing people to
do this stuff. They had posters just sort of encouraging
people to kill the pest. They would say things like
it would lead to happiness for ten thousand generations. They
would also have posters like positive ones like here's what
(09:59):
our future is going to look like with like farms
that are flourishing and industry that is doing great, and
all you have to do is is kill these pests.
It even filtered down to the level of children. They
had like children's songs and kids books talking about killing sparrows.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yeah, they did absolutely everything right to change people's views
on sparrows so thoroughly, because before they hadn't been seen
as pests until those grain estimates came in.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, they're sparrows exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So I believe the Chinese in up to nineteen fifty
eight fifty nine viewed sparrows pretty normally, and then all
of a sudden, the whole country was like, yes, well,
we'll kill sparrows, no problem, because that propaganda campaign was
so effective.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, they had they filled out the questionnaire how do
you view sparrows A favorably B not favorably? See don't
really have an opinion.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
And everybody said not favorably anymore.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So we should give the old grain of salt here.
As far as the numbers we're about to start talking about,
it is very hard for a few reasons, as it's
communists China, so any statistics need to have the grain
of salt that they put out. And also we're talking
about killing individual flies and mosquitos, so it's just really
tough to quantify that.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yes, but as we'll get to in a minute, I
tried to quantify it, and I think I did a
great job.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Oh boy, does that mean there's going to be some
Josh maths.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yeah, aces of Josh math You ready?
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah? Wait?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, Well let's just jump to that. Okay, Okay, we'll
come back to rats in a second. But flies, let's
talk about flies. One of the reasons flies were chosen
because they transfer all sorts of diseases because they like
to hang out on poop, and then they like to
go hang out on food that people eat. One of
the big problems, one of the big problem diseases that
they spread as cholera, which is not fun and it
(11:52):
spreads very easily. So flies were targeted in two hundred
and twenty million pounds of flies were killed.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Okay, hold on, I have a question, I got it. Interrupt. Okay,
are you about to say that you found out the
weight of an average fly to find the total number
of flies out of that two hundred and twenty million pounds? Yes, amazing?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
You ready?
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:15):
First of all, I have to shout out being and
it's ai. When I said how much is how many
flies are in one pound? I guess I actually put
one to two pounds. I tried to take the shortcut.
Bing comes back with one to two pounds of flies.
Biomass equals one to two pounds of flies. Say thanks
for the help, Bing. So I had to sledge forward
(12:36):
and do it myself. So I looked up how much
a house fly weighs. I saw fifty milligrams. I saw
ten milligrams. Okay, So if you divide that per pound,
that equals nine thousand flies per pound. Okay, it also
equals more. I'll get to that in a second. But
that so nice. So at fifty milligrams a fly, which
is way high, that's nine thousand flies per pound. Types
(12:59):
two hundred and twenty million pounds of flies equals one
point nine to eight trillion flies that were killed in
just a couple of years. Mind boggling. Right, we'll get this.
If you adjust to a fly weighing ten milligrams, the
ables almost the equals almost ten trillion flies that were
(13:21):
killed in China over the course of this four pest campaign.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Just a few years.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Ten trillion flies. That's that's the numbers I'm coming up with. Guys.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
That's amazing. And this wasn't a bit. I genuinely didn't
know that Josh was going to do that, but I
saw the riding on the wall. As soon as I
knew that it was pounds of flies, I was like,
I know he's going to figure out total flies.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah. Yeah. I didn't go ahead and convert it into
big max, which I feel a little bit about, but
you know, I still feel like I did a good job.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
All right. That's amazing. Rats they carry a disease called
scistos somiasis. I probably mispronounced that, but that is something
that can kill you with organ failure, can give you cancer.
Rats also stole grain, and apparently they would drive these
rats out of their holes, kill them, and allegedly get
the grain out of their heidi holes. And feed that
(14:12):
to livestock is supposedly what happened.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
That's vengeance right there. You actually take the grain that
the rats stole back. Yeah, something else. So one point
five billion rats were killed?
Speaker 1 (14:22):
How many pounds of brat is it? You got to
reverse engineer it?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So I would say about point seven a billion point
seven billion pounds of rats.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I'm going to go mean that I've seen New York rats.
I don't know if Chinese rats hold a candle beds
those New York rats. Those suckers can weigh several pounds.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I feel like, oh several pounds. Yeah, yeah, so I
stand by my estimate. Let's say point nine because not
all of them are going to weigh two pounds.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I love a rat, by the way.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
That's what I'm saying. I'm not fully on board. I
get rats really easily spread a lot of disease in
they had wow throughout human history. Rats themselves don't I
don't think are problematic and like individually.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Like the pet rat, Give me that little guy and
let me scratch it under the chin.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Super sweet. Yeah, so yeah, a lot of rats died. Again,
the reason why they targeted rats is not just from
spreading disease. But also they stole that grain too. They
estimated that rats stole way more than sparrows, at about
nine kilograms or twenty pounds per rat per year. So
the writing was on the wall for rats.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
They were well, mosquitos, no one likes. They spread malaria,
which is a bad problem. Obviously everyone knows that mosquitos,
you know, hosts their larvae and wet things and puddles
and spare tires and things like that still waters. So
citizens where they were like, hey, dredge your rivers, fill
(15:50):
your fill these watery ditches up with dirt, don't let
water collect. Get rid of those feet breeding grounds. They also,
and this is pretty remarkable, they fish and ducks to
specifically feed on their larva, which is pretty impressive. And
then you know, obviously swatting them is one way, but
lots of awful, harmful insecticides just being sprayed everywhere.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, this is our requisite reminiscence of the mosquito fogging
truck driving down the street at night in your neighborhood
in the summer. You remember that.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yeah, we didn't have those because we didn't live in neighborhoods,
but I knew they existed.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, they were something. Even back then in the seventies
and eighties, it was like, well, you need to steer
clear of those. They just looked ominous.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Yeah. The very first opening shots of my beloved documentary Vernon,
Florida is a mosquito truck going through the town.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Oh boy. Yeah, so they killed as far as China
estimates twenty four million pounds of mosquitoes or four point
three five four trillion mosquitos over the course of this campaign.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Hey, aside from the insecticide, I say hats off to
that one.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah. Remember we talked about it before, if not in
an episode, then on like Internet roundup, where there was
a geneticist or a molecular biologist maybe who's like, hey,
you know, I figured out a way so that we
can get rid of mosquitos forever in just a few
generations if we adjust this gene and release these genetically
modified mosquitos into the wild, and like it would have worked.
(17:22):
And everyone was like, you know, I don't know if
we should do that. Mosquitos might be providing some service
that we're just not aware of. It just seems wrong
or dumb to just eradicate them all. And so we
didn't pull the trigger on it, but some I think,
like Yukon or something. Professor had figured out exactly how
to do it.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, but didn't they also come back and say like no,
like we have yet to find any like if mosquitos
were removed, there's no domino effect in the insect chain,
like they could really go away and everyone would be fine.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yes, I do remember that too, And before you can
say anything else, to say, we take a break.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
That sounds great, great.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Thanks man, I appreciate the support.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
All right. So the fourth I know you were just
waiting with baited breath about sparrows. They again weren't considered
pest before the Great Leap Forward, which kind of preceded this.
But he had a very mouth, had a very effective
anti pest campaign going, so people bought into it, and
they would kill them. They would crush their little eggs.
(19:01):
They would like firecrackers and throw them at them. They
would destroy their nests. They would scare set up, scarecrows
or scare sparrows and fields and then shoot them dead.
But apparently the most popular, far and away the most
popular method is that they would just make such a
racket in the streets banging pots and pans and yelling
and screaming that the sparrows would fly until they tired
(19:25):
and then would just drop down from the sky.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Right but not dead. The people have to kill for them,
would go kill them by hand, usually squire storm or
break their necks or something like that. And guys, if
you are not familiar with sparrows, and you are not
driving right now, go look up sparrows. They're the little
cute brown birds that hop around outside on the cafe patio,
(19:48):
not bothering anybody, just being cute. These are the birds
that the people of China were killing by hand in
nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
I think, yeah, of finchy looking just they're very very cute.
Oh wow, for cute. I'm actually seeing a one of
those propaganda posters right now that has a rat, a sparrow,
a mosquito, and a fly impaled on a Chinese sword.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yes, that works. That makes me want to kill a sparrow.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It's kind of a really sweet poster actually, but I
just don't like the message.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, for sure, So as you can bet like this
led to the near extinction of sparrows in just a
few years.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
So here's the problem is with the sparrows. Sparrows eat locusts,
and locusts are a true pest. So without the sparrows,
the locusts really really thrived. It turns out that sparrows
are a very crucial part of maintaining that ecosystem, and
without them there were no natural predators for the locusts,
(20:54):
and they ballooned and the crops were devastated. I think
the World Atlas estimated that the locusts were ponssible for
destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of grain because of.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
This, right, So that was I mean, that equals a
lot of crop yield, even in China with all of
the arable land that they have. And so if you're
familiar with Chinese history, especially in the late fifties to
nineteen sixties, you know what's coming. The Great Famine of China.
It lasted from nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one,
(21:27):
and it is far and away the most devastating famine
in the history of humanity as far as recorded history goes. Yeah,
estimates run from fifteen million to up to seventy eight million,
and I saw reasonable people estimating it was actually between
twenty and fifty million people who starved to death from
(21:49):
just nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one in China.
That's how bad the famine was. And some people tie
that back to at least in part, the four Pest
campaign and the effect of removing sparrows from the ecosystem.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Yeah, for sure. I mean there was many reports and
instances of suicide, apparently cannibalism, people murdering each other to
get to their food. It got really really bad. There
was also it was also while it was happening, Mal
refused to acknowledge that it was happening, like there is
no famine. It was after everyone died, like a year
(22:26):
later that Mal finally admitted that a famine had occurred,
which is like everyone knows there's a famine going on.
So that's like the ultimate sort of gas lighting when
your leaders not even acknowledging that. But he didn't accept,
you know, he blamed it on rightists and their failure
to implement his policies correctly.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
From what I could tell, I did not see how
much he actually was aware. Part of the issue was
how just ensconced and insulated he was from bad news
because all of the people under him, and all the
people under those people were afraid of being beaten in
and murdered for giving Maw bad news essentially, so he
(23:05):
might have really not realized just how bad things will be.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I bet you can't lose fifty million people though, and
not just notice like traffic's better.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Well, the that's the other thing too. Most of the
deaths were in the rural areas. They were not in
the cities. A lot of people in the cities were
probably hard up, but they were not starving to death.
It was the people in the countryside. And a lot
of that had to do with terrible, terrible policies that
were on top of a bunch of other issues that
all kind of came together to exacerbate this famine and
(23:36):
make it as bad as it was.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, well we're going to talk about those because you know,
I don't think anyone maintains that it was just the
sparrows that caused this famine, right or you know, and
people to die at the rates of tens of millions.
But there there were a few factors. One was obviously
environmental factors. In nineteen fifty nine, there was a drought
in northern China, and rain and flooding in southern and
(24:02):
eastern China, and all of these natural disasters were kind
of happening at the same time, which are going to
affect the grain output. Led to a lot of grain deficit.
I think in nineteen fifty nine, fifty five percent, like
more than half of their farmland was unusable, and in
nineteen sixty their wheat harvest was down seventy percent.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, and that's a staple crop. I mean, that's the
kind of crop that you keep your people alive with,
is wheat, Right, So that was a big deal. There's
another one that may or may not have been true,
but I know that Mao blamed the Soviet Union on
the famine or making it as bad as it was,
and that supposedly the Soviet Union called in their debts
(24:44):
during this famine that the relations between Communist China and
Communist USSR had deteriorated right around this time, and so
just basically to well it be jerks, the USSR said, hey,
you know that money you owes, we need it right now.
I saw that that's not necessarily the case. And someone
said that the Soviet Union may have even offered for
(25:07):
them to stop making payments for the Chinese to stop
making payments to the USSR for three years during this famine.
I don't know if that's true or not, but that
is a long standing talking point that came out of China.
At the end of the famine, when mal finally did
admit that it had happened, he blamed it in part on.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
The USSR, Yeah, for sure. Another part was what we
kind of mentioned earlier with the Great Leap Forward, was
that push for industrialization, and not just a push, but
it's such a rapid pace that they completely upended kind
of the way things had been such that it was devastating.
They you know, if all of a sudden everyone is
(25:45):
led away from farming and producing steel in their backyard,
you're just going to have less grain planned to begin with.
And the other sort of irony to this is this
wasn't even good steel. That they were getting people making
steel in their backyards out of flatwear and pots and
pans just gets you pig iron. It didn't result in
anything that they could use for like big time construction.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, that was a huge one. I mean they were
also not trained, right, They just basically said, hey, create
a backyard smelting furnace, and here's your quota for steel
every month or quarter a year, go figure it out. Essentially,
So not only were they paying less attention to farming,
they were also spending more time trying to figure this out.
(26:29):
And then, like you said, we're unsuccessful. That was, from
what I saw, one of the biggest exacerbators of this
whole problem, because it reduced the crop output so drastically
that there was just not enough food to go around,
not even close to it, because people simply stopped farming
(26:50):
as much.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, and at the same time, they had quotas on
that grain. So even though they were saying, hey, go
quit growing things, make steel in the backyard, but also
we're going to raise the quotas on grain at the
same time to unprecedented levels basically, and of course they're
not going to meet those quotas. So party members were
afraid of being blamed kind of like what you were
(27:11):
talking about, and covering up this deficit. And if you
did try to report, you know, accurate numbers, you might
be beaten and detained or tortured. And so they thought
they had a grain surplus, so they end up exporting
grain when they were short on grain to feed their
own people because they thought they had a surplus.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yes, and not only would they export it. The grain
surplus was considered what the cities needed to survive, or
however much they needed to eat. They didn't calculate grain
surpluses based on what percentage of how much was grown.
It was the city's need this much. It doesn't matter
how much that leaves you peasant, because we're feeding the cities.
(27:51):
That's what we're interested in doing. And so that's why
I was saying most of the starvation happened in the countryside,
whereas the cities managed to survive, and I think that
that probably gave an impression that there wasn't actually a
famine going on. You had to go out into the
rural areas for that to happen. And then dissenters, people
who might speak up or criticize or whatever, were actually
(28:14):
tortured to death, beaten to death, murdered by the state.
And I think that someone estimated that there was between
six to eight percent of the deaths of the potentially
fifty million deaths during the entire Great Leap Forward were
caused by torture, and those were mostly peasants.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Six to eight percent. That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yeah, being tortured to death for basically speaking up about
being left distarved to death essentially.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
All right, I say we take another break and we
come back and talk about the legacy of this and
whether or not those sparrows made it come back in
China right after.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
This, okay, Chuck. So finally, finally, after a relatively short time,
(29:31):
China realized like, we should probably leave the sparrows alone again.
This was right before they became extinct in China, and
it was as recent or as soon as nineteen sixty.
I think the whole campaign started in nineteen fifty eight, right,
so just two to three years they were like, oh god,
this is not going well. So they took the sparrows
(29:52):
off and they said, bedbugs, you're up. And the bedbugs said, gulp.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Can I kill a bedbug with your permission?
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah? I've gotten a problem with killing bed bugs. I
don't know much about them. I just know that they're
very much disliked and they're hard to get rid of,
so why not?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Okay? Yeah, they swapped out sparrows for bed bugs. Eventually
they would add cockroaches to that list. Much to your chagrin,
but they did study sort of the initial years of
the four pest campaign. They did study what was going
on with the sparrows and you know, whether or not
it was making a difference, and they're eating habits and
(30:27):
things like that. And in nineteen sixty, I guess, I
don't know if this is right before or right after
it ended, but they reported like, hey, we were sort
of mistaken in our initial estimates. It turns out they
aren't eating as much grain as we thought. They actually
eat insects, Like seventy five percent of their diet consists
of insects and about twenty five percent is grain. And
(30:52):
this one researcher collected along with his colleagues, collected a
bunch of sparrows to study and found that, hey, they
they're seasonal grain eaters. On top of that, so during
the winter is the only time they're feeding on these
grain seeds. Otherwise they're generally eating pests that keep us,
you know, keep our harvest more safe.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Right exactly. I think that that was the the research
by zeng Zujin, pretty sure, it's as close as I
can get. His research was what led to the sparrows
being taken off of the Four Pest campaign.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So China realized the error of their ways and they
took sparrows off. But not only did they do that,
they started reintroducing them by importing them from the Soviet
Union to try to bring the sparrow population back, and slowly,
over the years it did bounce back. They're no longer extinct,
and there's hundreds of millions of them in China today,
(31:49):
but that's still far less than there was before the
Four Pest campaign. Part of the way that they have
been able to come back is China outlawed talk about
like just getting mixed messages here, kind of outlawed killing
sparrows after they took them off the four Pest list
and had said, go kill hundreds of millions of sparrows.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, driving from the sky with pots and pans, break
their cute little necks. And then a year later, actually,
you're going to go to jail if you killed more
than twenty of them. It's a criminal offense.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, isn't that crazy? That's life under an authoritarian government Tata.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, for sure. They've there's been, you know, different sort
of versions of the Four Pest campaign over the years.
That's continued. I know we mentioned the bed bugs. I
think that was in the nineteen sixties. In nineteen starting
in the eighties, rats came back on the scene as
far as you know, a big pest to eradicate. And
(32:49):
then in nineteen ninety eight there was a full sort
of reboot. Let's go back to the four pest campaign,
remember that that TV show we all love back then,
let's reboot it and new propaganda posters in nineteen ninety eight,
like kind of like the old style instill. But this
is when they added the cockroaches, so it was flies, mosquitos, rats,
(33:10):
and cocker roaches.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
And that nineteen eighties rat eradication campaign was very successful.
In nineteen eighty four alone, trying to kill an estimated
five percent of the entire global rat population. They killed
so many rats one year.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Yeah, I mean they were paying citizens in as late
as two thousand and seven to kill individual flies in
certain places.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah. And I think in twenty twenty four they started
another mosquito campaign, anti mosquito campaign to try to create
the mosquito free village. So not bad, I mean, considering
that they got rid of malaria back in what year.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Was that I think they I think they finally wasn't
it like twenty twenty one, they finally said they were
malaria free.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yes, so it did have some positive effects at least
as far as the stupid mosquito go. But the Great Famine,
which you just can't talk about the four Pest campaign
without talking about the Great Famine because they were tied
together in some ways. For sure. They did a study,
I think two different studies in twenty twenty three on
(34:16):
the effects the Great Famine had on people who survived it,
and they found that there are definite differences between people
who lived through the Great Famine and people who didn't.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Yeah, I believe that was a higher rate of non
communicable diseases We're talking diabetes, cancer, psychiatric problems even yea
than the general population, and may have also caused a
decline in the male birth rate all the way through
the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, which is really ironic considering the one child policy,
you know, Yeah for sure, Yeah, which I guess either
as ironic because of the one child policy or led
to the one child policy. Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (34:57):
I got nothing else? Four Pests is over.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Yeah. I had tip to Emily for coming up with
that and one little line yap is obnoxious, people call it.
If you want to know what they call sparrows in China,
they call them macha.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
I've never heard of lon yap.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Sure you have. I've made that joke before and you
thought it was hilarious. Really yeah, it's like an extra
little something, like an extra little treat. I heard it
on like the Splendid Table once they used it seriously
where they were talking about how the bottom of an
ice cream cone is filled with a little bit of
chocolate to keep the ice cream from melting out the bottom.
(35:34):
They called it a little line yap.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
That formed my impression of the word land yap from
that point forward.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
So in that case, the cherry on top is the
chocolate on the bottom.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Chuck Wow, Wow, Well, I think obviously Chuck has brought
about listener mail.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
This is joke or not, Josh, so you get to
answer this question. Had a few people right in, so
I think there was either some confusion of a joke
or maybe you just got something wrong. We'll see. Hey, guys,
the reason I'm writing is because I heard something in
the first Heavy Metal episode that I thought was a joke.
But after listening to the audio again and checking the
transcript even I'm wondering if it's just an error. And
(36:15):
it got through mainly because it was so deadpan. But seabuddy, Brian,
you can never tell with Josh because he can be
so deadpan. I've shown over and over and over that
I can't tell sometimes if he's joking. Here we go.
Josh explained that Black Sabbath got their name from the
Boris Karloff movie Black Sabbath, which is true, but the
film isn't about a talking boat winning a regatta for
(36:38):
a group of orphans. In the film, Karloff hosts three
different horror stories, but none are about a regatta or orphans.
Boris Karloff as an animated talking boat that saved orphans
would be amazing at any rate. Maybe I'm wrong and
Josh was joking and Chuck just missed it, or it
was explained to such and I miss it, but I
wanted to pass it along.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Rock On.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
That is from Brian and Brookline, New Hampshire.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Nice Brian, Rian, Brian, Thanks Brian, So what is it?
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Let me just walk us through a couple of points
real quick, and I think it'll become.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Clear, okay.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
One is that Black Sabbath the band would name themselves
after a movie about a talking boat at windsor Regotta
for a group of orphans.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Seems like a joke.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And secondly that a movie about a talking boat that
windsor Regatta for a group of orphans is called Black Sabbath.
It seems like totally.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Made okay, So is there a talking boat orphan movie
and you were just referencing that as a joke or
did you just completely whole cloth create that.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I made that up from whole cloth? I don't. I
don't think there's a movie like that. I could believe it,
but I've never heard of one.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Well, then, in that case, my friend, I give you
the improv a word for the month because that you
sold it and it was pretty great.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Thank you. I appreciate that. That means the world to me.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
I couldn't have made up such an outlandish movie plot
on the on the off the dome like that.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Nice. Thank you, and thank you to Brian for bringing
that to Chuck's attention. I've been waiting a little while
and I'm glad we got a chance to go over it.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
It's very satisfying.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
It was very satisfying. If you want to be like
Brian and set us up for a satisfying conversation, we
love that kind of stuff. You can send us an
email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.
It's just us and that's okay because we are going
to do our best today pronouncing Chinese words, which is
always a laugh riot. If you're a fan of the.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Podcast, Yeah, you can take those, my friend, because I'm
meant to look up the pronunciations and I didn't get
a chance to. But this topic about the four pests
campaign comes to you from listener, actually non listener, Emily Bryant,
my wife, No nice. She gave me the idea and
I was like, oh yeah, I looked into a little bit.
It's like, yeah, this will be good.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
That's funny. I wondered if you had thought of it
because of you killing the cockroach recently on air.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
No, but I do have to say you judge me
pretty hard on the cockroach, and while just very casually
talking about how much you would kill a mosquito and
ticks and flees, but oh not the cockroach, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
No, was I a little harsh?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I'm sorry, No, you weren't harsh, but I was like,
wait a minute, you're killing three out of fourties and
acting like you're, you know, gods get the insects.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, my boundaries apply to all. Yeah, okay, we're not
talking about cockroaches yet, we're talking about rats, mosquitoes, flies.
I have an issue with rats, but I get where
they're coming from. And sparrows. These were the four pests
(01:39):
that made up of the Four Pests campaign carried out
at the end of the fifties beginning of the nineteen
sixties in communist China, which newspapers at the time called
Red China. And it was an enormously successful communist eradication
campaign that was bent on controlling nature. And did it
(02:00):
ever work.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yeah, I mean successful in one way, very destructive in another.
And we'll get to all that. Obviously, we're talking about
the leader at the time, mal Zedong, And this had
was not the first time something like this had been tried,
and it's been tried since then over there as well.
In the nineteen twenties and thirties. In China, they had
fly killing campaigns. In mid nineteen twenties, it was a
(02:26):
fly campaign such that the Southeast University in Nanjing was
it was very effective and they were you know, this
is very much like anecdotal, like there were practically no
flies there all summer. Yeah, but apparently it worked pretty good.
And then they did this at other times in the
nineteen twenties and thirties where they were incentivized, like middle
(02:46):
schoolers to go out and kill flies and bring them
in and show them to their teachers and like a
little matchbox, let's say, and things like that. But apparently
that resulted in more than ten million dead flies. So
there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, so much so that I actually saw a contemporaneous
newspaper account that was talking about the Four Pests campaign
when it kicked off, and the newspapers is an American
newspaper just kind of chied it and said the fact
that they're having to include flies belies the boasts that
there were no flies in China. So apparently after these
(03:22):
eradication campaigns, I told the rest of the world, we
don't have flies anymore, suckers, because we get rid of it.
We takes care of business, I think, is how they
put it.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah, the Four Pests that we need to sort of
set the stage because it's kind of rooted in the
Great Leap Forward and that was a very ambitious campaign
in nineteen fifty eight January nineteen fifty eight that had
a lot of initiatives, but the real goal, the kind
of stated goal, was to industrialize and to overtake the
UK's industrial output in less than fifteen years, mainly in
(03:57):
There are lots of ways they wanted to do this,
but mainly to outdo them and steel production.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, and just a quick reminder, the UK is where
the industrial revolution began. So this was beyond ambitious for China,
especially from the place that they were coming from. So
MAO was extremely ambitious, I guess. And to do something
like this that required really huge, sweeping changes and for
(04:25):
them to happen immediately. You weren't transitioning into anything. It
was stop doing this and start doing this.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, like stop farming and build a steel furnace in
your backyard and start smelting. Was tried new weird sort
of farming techniques that weren't tested. It was. It was
a pretty enthusiastic campaign, you know, from the people, just
how they received it and how they got into it.
Apparently that farmers sometimes or people would just work late
(04:55):
into the night and they called it catching the moon
and stars and public officials were they would issue these
steel and grain quotas to like, you know, make as
much steel and grow as much grain as you could.
But they were very unrealistic quotas. They were not able
to fulfill those, and in that time, with you know,
this sort of idealistic, authoritative approach to government, they were
(05:18):
over reporting output. And as we'll see, that kind of
happened again with a four pest campaign.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, that was an enormous problem that China ran into,
and almost immediately after they began the four Pest campaign,
and even though they were kind of parallel to one another,
they were definitely intertwined at least to some degree. Right, Yeah,
So the four Pest campaign itself, you might say, like, Okay,
China's trying to industrialize and catch up to the UK,
(05:47):
who cares about flies and sparrows? And it turns out
that Mao cared a lot about flies and sparrows and
other pests. He and I've noticed this before, and a
lot of the stuff he talked about, he almost had
like a contempt for nature and a real like inner
desire to dominate nature and bend it to human will,
(06:09):
to his will. At least he had a slogan called
man Must Conquer Nature. Yeah, pretty on the nose, right, Yeah.
And also apparently he was quoted back in nineteen fifty
eight that he wanted to make the high mountain bow
its head, make the river yield the way, and so
this really kind of tied these eradication campaigns. And make
(06:30):
no mistake, the point was to get rid of every fly,
every rat, every mosquito, and every sparrow in all of China.
So this eradication campaign really kind of fit into that
viewpoint that he held.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, for sure, So there was some megalomania involved, for sure,
but it definitely had genuine roots and amibition to be
to get rid of disease, to stop these contagions from spreading,
because they were out of a decade in the nineteen
forties where they had smallpox and cholera and malaria and
(07:07):
the infant mortality rate was like thirty percent. So there
was definitely you know, they reacted with these big, large
scale vaccination drives, sanitation initiatives, but getting rid of these
pests they thought could get rid of the things that
were causing these diseases to begin with. Yeah, and getting
rid of these pests, and three of the cases would
(07:27):
get rid of these diseases to begin with. In the
case of sparrows, they're not spreading disease, but he sparrows
are grain thieves. They eat grain, and so they had
these wild estimates that sparrows could, like the food they
lost to grain by sparrows could feed up to sixty
thousand people. So that's why they were on the list.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yes, somehow they calculated that each sparrow stole in eight
about four and a half kilograms a year, which equals
to about ten pounds, which is a staging amount of
grain for one single bird to steal from, like right
out of the Chinese people's mouths. So that was why
(08:09):
sparrow's were on there. You might have been sitting here
the whole time, going, what are you talking about with
sparrow's the little bird, They're the greatest of all birds potentially,
why would you want to kill sparrows? And sparrows just
got wrapped up into this big drag night essentially.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, along with other birds by accident, of course.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yes, so the whole thing was essentially like an adopt
a mile program, except with killing animals.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yeah, I mean they had sanitation teams that people would
organize in communities. They would go out together and hunt rats.
They encourage kids, of course to do this, but just individually,
they were encouraging people like, hey, kill every mosquito you
can find, kill every fly that comes near you. It's
your patriotic duty to do so. They would incentivize and
(08:55):
reward people sometimes, but usually it was just like, this
is something you need to get on board with.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Make us all healthier, exactly, And going back to that
infant mortality rate, talking about making them healthier, like, this
is where they were coming from. That thirty percent. The
way that it's expressed typically is number of deaths per
one thousand berths, So that's three hundred deaths per one
thousand berths. So this was an staggering infant mortality rate
(09:22):
that they were dealing with, and it kind of drives
home like, Okay, this was even more ambitious than it
seems on its face, because not only are they trying
to leap forward, they're really having to come from a
deficit to even begin to leap.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah, for sure, And of course in communists China, how
are you going to get this ball rolling through government propaganda?
It was a big, big part of mobilizing people to
do this stuff. They had posters just sort of encouraging
people to kill the pest. They would say things like
it would lead to happiness for ten thousand generations. They
would also have posters like positive ones like here's what
(09:59):
our future is going to look like with like farms
that are flourishing and industry that is doing great, and
all you have to do is is kill these pests.
It even filtered down to the level of children. They
had like children's songs and kids books talking about killing sparrows.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yeah, they did absolutely everything right to change people's views
on sparrows so thoroughly, because before they hadn't been seen
as pests until those grain estimates came in.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, they're sparrows exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So I believe the Chinese in up to nineteen fifty
eight fifty nine viewed sparrows pretty normally, and then all
of a sudden, the whole country was like, yes, well,
we'll kill sparrows, no problem, because that propaganda campaign was
so effective.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, they had they filled out the questionnaire how do
you view sparrows A favorably B not favorably? See don't
really have an opinion.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
And everybody said not favorably anymore.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So we should give the old grain of salt here.
As far as the numbers we're about to start talking about,
it is very hard for a few reasons, as it's
communists China, so any statistics need to have the grain
of salt that they put out. And also we're talking
about killing individual flies and mosquitos, so it's just really
tough to quantify that.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yes, but as we'll get to in a minute, I
tried to quantify it, and I think I did a
great job.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Oh boy, does that mean there's going to be some
Josh maths.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yeah, aces of Josh math You ready?
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah? Wait?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, Well let's just jump to that. Okay, Okay, we'll
come back to rats in a second. But flies, let's
talk about flies. One of the reasons flies were chosen
because they transfer all sorts of diseases because they like
to hang out on poop, and then they like to
go hang out on food that people eat. One of
the big problems, one of the big problem diseases that
they spread as cholera, which is not fun and it
(11:52):
spreads very easily. So flies were targeted in two hundred
and twenty million pounds of flies were killed.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Okay, hold on, I have a question, I got it. Interrupt. Okay,
are you about to say that you found out the
weight of an average fly to find the total number
of flies out of that two hundred and twenty million pounds? Yes, amazing?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
You ready?
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:15):
First of all, I have to shout out being and
it's ai. When I said how much is how many
flies are in one pound? I guess I actually put
one to two pounds. I tried to take the shortcut.
Bing comes back with one to two pounds of flies.
Biomass equals one to two pounds of flies. Say thanks
for the help, Bing. So I had to sledge forward
(12:36):
and do it myself. So I looked up how much
a house fly weighs. I saw fifty milligrams. I saw
ten milligrams. Okay, So if you divide that per pound,
that equals nine thousand flies per pound. Okay, it also
equals more. I'll get to that in a second. But
that so nice. So at fifty milligrams a fly, which
is way high, that's nine thousand flies per pound. Types
(12:59):
two hundred and twenty million pounds of flies equals one
point nine to eight trillion flies that were killed in
just a couple of years. Mind boggling. Right, we'll get this.
If you adjust to a fly weighing ten milligrams, the
ables almost the equals almost ten trillion flies that were
(13:21):
killed in China over the course of this four pest campaign.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Just a few years.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Ten trillion flies. That's that's the numbers I'm coming up with. Guys.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
That's amazing. And this wasn't a bit. I genuinely didn't
know that Josh was going to do that, but I
saw the riding on the wall. As soon as I
knew that it was pounds of flies, I was like,
I know he's going to figure out total flies.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah. Yeah. I didn't go ahead and convert it into
big max, which I feel a little bit about, but
you know, I still feel like I did a good job.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
All right. That's amazing. Rats they carry a disease called
scistos somiasis. I probably mispronounced that, but that is something
that can kill you with organ failure, can give you cancer.
Rats also stole grain, and apparently they would drive these
rats out of their holes, kill them, and allegedly get
the grain out of their heidi holes. And feed that
(14:12):
to livestock is supposedly what happened.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
That's vengeance right there. You actually take the grain that
the rats stole back. Yeah, something else. So one point
five billion rats were killed?
Speaker 1 (14:22):
How many pounds of brat is it? You got to
reverse engineer it?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So I would say about point seven a billion point
seven billion pounds of rats.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
I'm going to go mean that I've seen New York rats.
I don't know if Chinese rats hold a candle beds
those New York rats. Those suckers can weigh several pounds.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I feel like, oh several pounds. Yeah, yeah, so I
stand by my estimate. Let's say point nine because not
all of them are going to weigh two pounds.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I love a rat, by the way.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
That's what I'm saying. I'm not fully on board. I
get rats really easily spread a lot of disease in
they had wow throughout human history. Rats themselves don't I
don't think are problematic and like individually.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Like the pet rat, Give me that little guy and
let me scratch it under the chin.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Super sweet. Yeah, so yeah, a lot of rats died. Again,
the reason why they targeted rats is not just from
spreading disease. But also they stole that grain too. They
estimated that rats stole way more than sparrows, at about
nine kilograms or twenty pounds per rat per year. So
the writing was on the wall for rats.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
They were well, mosquitos, no one likes. They spread malaria,
which is a bad problem. Obviously everyone knows that mosquitos,
you know, hosts their larvae and wet things and puddles
and spare tires and things like that still waters. So
citizens where they were like, hey, dredge your rivers, fill
(15:50):
your fill these watery ditches up with dirt, don't let
water collect. Get rid of those feet breeding grounds. They also,
and this is pretty remarkable, they fish and ducks to
specifically feed on their larva, which is pretty impressive. And
then you know, obviously swatting them is one way, but
lots of awful, harmful insecticides just being sprayed everywhere.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, this is our requisite reminiscence of the mosquito fogging
truck driving down the street at night in your neighborhood
in the summer. You remember that.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yeah, we didn't have those because we didn't live in neighborhoods,
but I knew they existed.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, they were something. Even back then in the seventies
and eighties, it was like, well, you need to steer
clear of those. They just looked ominous.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Yeah. The very first opening shots of my beloved documentary Vernon,
Florida is a mosquito truck going through the town.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Oh boy. Yeah, so they killed as far as China
estimates twenty four million pounds of mosquitoes or four point
three five four trillion mosquitos over the course of this campaign.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Hey, aside from the insecticide, I say hats off to
that one.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah. Remember we talked about it before, if not in
an episode, then on like Internet roundup, where there was
a geneticist or a molecular biologist maybe who's like, hey,
you know, I figured out a way so that we
can get rid of mosquitos forever in just a few
generations if we adjust this gene and release these genetically
modified mosquitos into the wild, and like it would have worked.
(17:22):
And everyone was like, you know, I don't know if
we should do that. Mosquitos might be providing some service
that we're just not aware of. It just seems wrong
or dumb to just eradicate them all. And so we
didn't pull the trigger on it, but some I think,
like Yukon or something. Professor had figured out exactly how
to do it.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, but didn't they also come back and say like no,
like we have yet to find any like if mosquitos
were removed, there's no domino effect in the insect chain,
like they could really go away and everyone would be fine.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yes, I do remember that too, And before you can
say anything else, to say, we take a break.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
That sounds great, great.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Thanks man, I appreciate the support.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
All right. So the fourth I know you were just
waiting with baited breath about sparrows. They again weren't considered
pest before the Great Leap Forward, which kind of preceded this.
But he had a very mouth, had a very effective
anti pest campaign going, so people bought into it, and
they would kill them. They would crush their little eggs.
(19:01):
They would like firecrackers and throw them at them. They
would destroy their nests. They would scare set up, scarecrows
or scare sparrows and fields and then shoot them dead.
But apparently the most popular, far and away the most
popular method is that they would just make such a
racket in the streets banging pots and pans and yelling
and screaming that the sparrows would fly until they tired
(19:25):
and then would just drop down from the sky.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Right but not dead. The people have to kill for them,
would go kill them by hand, usually squire storm or
break their necks or something like that. And guys, if
you are not familiar with sparrows, and you are not
driving right now, go look up sparrows. They're the little
cute brown birds that hop around outside on the cafe patio,
(19:48):
not bothering anybody, just being cute. These are the birds
that the people of China were killing by hand in
nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
I think, yeah, of finchy looking just they're very very cute.
Oh wow, for cute. I'm actually seeing a one of
those propaganda posters right now that has a rat, a sparrow,
a mosquito, and a fly impaled on a Chinese sword.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yes, that works. That makes me want to kill a sparrow.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It's kind of a really sweet poster actually, but I
just don't like the message.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, for sure, So as you can bet like this
led to the near extinction of sparrows in just a
few years.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
So here's the problem is with the sparrows. Sparrows eat locusts,
and locusts are a true pest. So without the sparrows,
the locusts really really thrived. It turns out that sparrows
are a very crucial part of maintaining that ecosystem, and
without them there were no natural predators for the locusts,
(20:54):
and they ballooned and the crops were devastated. I think
the World Atlas estimated that the locusts were ponssible for
destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of grain because of.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
This, right, So that was I mean, that equals a
lot of crop yield, even in China with all of
the arable land that they have. And so if you're
familiar with Chinese history, especially in the late fifties to
nineteen sixties, you know what's coming. The Great Famine of China.
It lasted from nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one,
(21:27):
and it is far and away the most devastating famine
in the history of humanity as far as recorded history goes. Yeah,
estimates run from fifteen million to up to seventy eight million,
and I saw reasonable people estimating it was actually between
twenty and fifty million people who starved to death from
(21:49):
just nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one in China.
That's how bad the famine was. And some people tie
that back to at least in part, the four Pest
campaign and the effect of removing sparrows from the ecosystem.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Yeah, for sure. I mean there was many reports and
instances of suicide, apparently cannibalism, people murdering each other to
get to their food. It got really really bad. There
was also it was also while it was happening, Mal
refused to acknowledge that it was happening, like there is
no famine. It was after everyone died, like a year
(22:26):
later that Mal finally admitted that a famine had occurred,
which is like everyone knows there's a famine going on.
So that's like the ultimate sort of gas lighting when
your leaders not even acknowledging that. But he didn't accept,
you know, he blamed it on rightists and their failure
to implement his policies correctly.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
From what I could tell, I did not see how
much he actually was aware. Part of the issue was
how just ensconced and insulated he was from bad news
because all of the people under him, and all the
people under those people were afraid of being beaten in
and murdered for giving Maw bad news essentially, so he
(23:05):
might have really not realized just how bad things will be.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I bet you can't lose fifty million people though, and
not just notice like traffic's better.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Well, the that's the other thing too. Most of the
deaths were in the rural areas. They were not in
the cities. A lot of people in the cities were
probably hard up, but they were not starving to death.
It was the people in the countryside. And a lot
of that had to do with terrible, terrible policies that
were on top of a bunch of other issues that
all kind of came together to exacerbate this famine and
(23:36):
make it as bad as it was.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, well we're going to talk about those because you know,
I don't think anyone maintains that it was just the
sparrows that caused this famine, right or you know, and
people to die at the rates of tens of millions.
But there there were a few factors. One was obviously
environmental factors. In nineteen fifty nine, there was a drought
in northern China, and rain and flooding in southern and
(24:02):
eastern China, and all of these natural disasters were kind
of happening at the same time, which are going to
affect the grain output. Led to a lot of grain deficit.
I think in nineteen fifty nine, fifty five percent, like
more than half of their farmland was unusable, and in
nineteen sixty their wheat harvest was down seventy percent.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, and that's a staple crop. I mean, that's the
kind of crop that you keep your people alive with,
is wheat, Right, So that was a big deal. There's
another one that may or may not have been true,
but I know that Mao blamed the Soviet Union on
the famine or making it as bad as it was,
and that supposedly the Soviet Union called in their debts
(24:44):
during this famine that the relations between Communist China and
Communist USSR had deteriorated right around this time, and so
just basically to well it be jerks, the USSR said, hey,
you know that money you owes, we need it right now.
I saw that that's not necessarily the case. And someone
said that the Soviet Union may have even offered for
(25:07):
them to stop making payments for the Chinese to stop
making payments to the USSR for three years during this famine.
I don't know if that's true or not, but that
is a long standing talking point that came out of China.
At the end of the famine, when mal finally did
admit that it had happened, he blamed it in part on.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
The USSR, Yeah, for sure. Another part was what we
kind of mentioned earlier with the Great Leap Forward, was
that push for industrialization, and not just a push, but
it's such a rapid pace that they completely upended kind
of the way things had been such that it was devastating.
They you know, if all of a sudden everyone is
(25:45):
led away from farming and producing steel in their backyard,
you're just going to have less grain planned to begin with.
And the other sort of irony to this is this
wasn't even good steel. That they were getting people making
steel in their backyards out of flatwear and pots and
pans just gets you pig iron. It didn't result in
anything that they could use for like big time construction.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, that was a huge one. I mean they were
also not trained, right, They just basically said, hey, create
a backyard smelting furnace, and here's your quota for steel
every month or quarter a year, go figure it out. Essentially,
So not only were they paying less attention to farming,
they were also spending more time trying to figure this out.
(26:29):
And then, like you said, we're unsuccessful. That was, from
what I saw, one of the biggest exacerbators of this
whole problem, because it reduced the crop output so drastically
that there was just not enough food to go around,
not even close to it, because people simply stopped farming
(26:50):
as much.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, and at the same time, they had quotas on
that grain. So even though they were saying, hey, go
quit growing things, make steel in the backyard, but also
we're going to raise the quotas on grain at the
same time to unprecedented levels basically, and of course they're
not going to meet those quotas. So party members were
afraid of being blamed kind of like what you were
(27:11):
talking about, and covering up this deficit. And if you
did try to report, you know, accurate numbers, you might
be beaten and detained or tortured. And so they thought
they had a grain surplus, so they end up exporting
grain when they were short on grain to feed their
own people because they thought they had a surplus.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yes, and not only would they export it. The grain
surplus was considered what the cities needed to survive, or
however much they needed to eat. They didn't calculate grain
surpluses based on what percentage of how much was grown.
It was the city's need this much. It doesn't matter
how much that leaves you peasant, because we're feeding the cities.
(27:51):
That's what we're interested in doing. And so that's why
I was saying most of the starvation happened in the countryside,
whereas the cities managed to survive, and I think that
that probably gave an impression that there wasn't actually a
famine going on. You had to go out into the
rural areas for that to happen. And then dissenters, people
who might speak up or criticize or whatever, were actually
(28:14):
tortured to death, beaten to death, murdered by the state.
And I think that someone estimated that there was between
six to eight percent of the deaths of the potentially
fifty million deaths during the entire Great Leap Forward were
caused by torture, and those were mostly peasants.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Six to eight percent. That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yeah, being tortured to death for basically speaking up about
being left distarved to death essentially.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
All right, I say we take another break and we
come back and talk about the legacy of this and
whether or not those sparrows made it come back in
China right after.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
This, okay, Chuck. So finally, finally, after a relatively short time,
(29:31):
China realized like, we should probably leave the sparrows alone again.
This was right before they became extinct in China, and
it was as recent or as soon as nineteen sixty.
I think the whole campaign started in nineteen fifty eight, right,
so just two to three years they were like, oh god,
this is not going well. So they took the sparrows
(29:52):
off and they said, bedbugs, you're up. And the bedbugs said, gulp.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Can I kill a bedbug with your permission?
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah? I've gotten a problem with killing bed bugs. I
don't know much about them. I just know that they're
very much disliked and they're hard to get rid of,
so why not?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Okay? Yeah, they swapped out sparrows for bed bugs. Eventually
they would add cockroaches to that list. Much to your chagrin,
but they did study sort of the initial years of
the four pest campaign. They did study what was going
on with the sparrows and you know, whether or not
it was making a difference, and they're eating habits and
(30:27):
things like that. And in nineteen sixty, I guess, I
don't know if this is right before or right after
it ended, but they reported like, hey, we were sort
of mistaken in our initial estimates. It turns out they
aren't eating as much grain as we thought. They actually
eat insects, Like seventy five percent of their diet consists
of insects and about twenty five percent is grain. And
(30:52):
this one researcher collected along with his colleagues, collected a
bunch of sparrows to study and found that, hey, they
they're seasonal grain eaters. On top of that, so during
the winter is the only time they're feeding on these
grain seeds. Otherwise they're generally eating pests that keep us,
you know, keep our harvest more safe.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Right exactly. I think that that was the the research
by zeng Zujin, pretty sure, it's as close as I
can get. His research was what led to the sparrows
being taken off of the Four Pest campaign.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
So China realized the error of their ways and they
took sparrows off. But not only did they do that,
they started reintroducing them by importing them from the Soviet
Union to try to bring the sparrow population back, and slowly,
over the years it did bounce back. They're no longer extinct,
and there's hundreds of millions of them in China today,
(31:49):
but that's still far less than there was before the
Four Pest campaign. Part of the way that they have
been able to come back is China outlawed talk about
like just getting mixed messages here, kind of outlawed killing
sparrows after they took them off the four Pest list
and had said, go kill hundreds of millions of sparrows.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, driving from the sky with pots and pans, break
their cute little necks. And then a year later, actually,
you're going to go to jail if you killed more
than twenty of them. It's a criminal offense.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, isn't that crazy? That's life under an authoritarian government Tata.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, for sure. They've there's been, you know, different sort
of versions of the Four Pest campaign over the years.
That's continued. I know we mentioned the bed bugs. I
think that was in the nineteen sixties. In nineteen starting
in the eighties, rats came back on the scene as
far as you know, a big pest to eradicate. And
(32:49):
then in nineteen ninety eight there was a full sort
of reboot. Let's go back to the four pest campaign,
remember that that TV show we all love back then,
let's reboot it and new propaganda posters in nineteen ninety eight,
like kind of like the old style instill. But this
is when they added the cockroaches, so it was flies, mosquitos, rats,
(33:10):
and cocker roaches.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
And that nineteen eighties rat eradication campaign was very successful.
In nineteen eighty four alone, trying to kill an estimated
five percent of the entire global rat population. They killed
so many rats one year.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
Yeah, I mean they were paying citizens in as late
as two thousand and seven to kill individual flies in
certain places.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah. And I think in twenty twenty four they started
another mosquito campaign, anti mosquito campaign to try to create
the mosquito free village. So not bad, I mean, considering
that they got rid of malaria back in what year.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Was that I think they I think they finally wasn't
it like twenty twenty one, they finally said they were
malaria free.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yes, so it did have some positive effects at least
as far as the stupid mosquito go. But the Great Famine,
which you just can't talk about the four Pest campaign
without talking about the Great Famine because they were tied
together in some ways. For sure. They did a study,
I think two different studies in twenty twenty three on
(34:16):
the effects the Great Famine had on people who survived it,
and they found that there are definite differences between people
who lived through the Great Famine and people who didn't.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Yeah, I believe that was a higher rate of non
communicable diseases We're talking diabetes, cancer, psychiatric problems even yea
than the general population, and may have also caused a
decline in the male birth rate all the way through
the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, which is really ironic considering the one child policy,
you know, Yeah for sure, Yeah, which I guess either
as ironic because of the one child policy or led
to the one child policy. Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (34:57):
I got nothing else? Four Pests is over.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Yeah. I had tip to Emily for coming up with
that and one little line yap is obnoxious, people call it.
If you want to know what they call sparrows in China,
they call them macha.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
I've never heard of lon yap.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Sure you have. I've made that joke before and you
thought it was hilarious. Really yeah, it's like an extra
little something, like an extra little treat. I heard it
on like the Splendid Table once they used it seriously
where they were talking about how the bottom of an
ice cream cone is filled with a little bit of
chocolate to keep the ice cream from melting out the bottom.
(35:34):
They called it a little line yap.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
That formed my impression of the word land yap from
that point forward.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
So in that case, the cherry on top is the
chocolate on the bottom.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Chuck Wow, Wow, Well, I think obviously Chuck has brought
about listener mail.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
This is joke or not, Josh, so you get to
answer this question. Had a few people right in, so
I think there was either some confusion of a joke
or maybe you just got something wrong. We'll see. Hey, guys,
the reason I'm writing is because I heard something in
the first Heavy Metal episode that I thought was a joke.
But after listening to the audio again and checking the
transcript even I'm wondering if it's just an error. And
(36:15):
it got through mainly because it was so deadpan. But seabuddy, Brian,
you can never tell with Josh because he can be
so deadpan. I've shown over and over and over that
I can't tell sometimes if he's joking. Here we go.
Josh explained that Black Sabbath got their name from the
Boris Karloff movie Black Sabbath, which is true, but the
film isn't about a talking boat winning a regatta for
(36:38):
a group of orphans. In the film, Karloff hosts three
different horror stories, but none are about a regatta or orphans.
Boris Karloff as an animated talking boat that saved orphans
would be amazing at any rate. Maybe I'm wrong and
Josh was joking and Chuck just missed it, or it
was explained to such and I miss it, but I
wanted to pass it along.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Rock On.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
That is from Brian and Brookline, New Hampshire.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Nice Brian, Rian, Brian, Thanks Brian, So what is it?
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Let me just walk us through a couple of points
real quick, and I think it'll become.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Clear, okay.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
One is that Black Sabbath the band would name themselves
after a movie about a talking boat at windsor Regotta
for a group of orphans.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Seems like a joke.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And secondly that a movie about a talking boat that
windsor Regatta for a group of orphans is called Black Sabbath.
It seems like totally.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Made okay, So is there a talking boat orphan movie
and you were just referencing that as a joke or
did you just completely whole cloth create that.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I made that up from whole cloth? I don't. I
don't think there's a movie like that. I could believe it,
but I've never heard of one.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Well, then, in that case, my friend, I give you
the improv a word for the month because that you
sold it and it was pretty great.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Thank you. I appreciate that. That means the world to me.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
I couldn't have made up such an outlandish movie plot
on the on the off the dome like that.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Nice. Thank you, and thank you to Brian for bringing
that to Chuck's attention. I've been waiting a little while
and I'm glad we got a chance to go over it.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
It's very satisfying.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
It was very satisfying. If you want to be like
Brian and set us up for a satisfying conversation, we
love that kind of stuff. You can send us an
email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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