What was the Four Pests Campaign?

Say one thing about Mao's communist China, they could kill some sparrows. Learn why and how in today's episode. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:31Josh Clark?

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• 1:37Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:47Josh Clark?

  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 podcast.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can take those, my friend, because I 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.

• 2:16Josh Clark?

  Oh, nice.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  She gave me the idea and I was like, oh yeah. I looked into a little bit, it's like, yeah, this, this will be good.

• 2:22Josh Clark?

  That's funny. I wondered if you had thought of it because of you killing the cockroach recently on air.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  No, but I do have to say you 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 fleas, but but oh, not the cockroach, Chuck.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  No. Was I a little harsh? I'm sorry.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  No, you weren't harsh, but I was like, wait a minute, you're killing three out of four of these and acting like you're, you know,

• 2:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  God's gift to insects.

• 2:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, my boundaries apply to all.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:00Josh Clark?

  So we're not, 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 that made up the four pests campaign carried out at the end of the 50s, beginning of the 1960s 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 boy, did it ever work.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  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, Mao 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 1920s and 30s in China, they had fly killing campaigns. In mid 1920s, there was a 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.

• 4:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  But apparently it worked pretty good. And then they did this at other times in the 1920s and 30s, where they were incentivized like middle schoolers to go out and kill flies and bring them in and show them to their teachers in like a little matchbox, let's say, and things like that. But apparently that resulted in more than 10 million dead flies.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  So there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this.

• 4:38Josh Clark?

  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 newspaper, this is an American newspaper, just kind of chided and said, the fact that they're having to include flies belies the boast that there were no flies in China. So apparently, after these eradication campaigns, China 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.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, the four pests, though, 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 1958, January 1958, 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 15 years. Mainly, and there are lots of ways they wanted to do this, but mainly to outdo them in steel production.

• 5:39Josh Clark?

  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 them to happen immediately. You weren't transitioning into anything. It was, "Stop doing this and start doing this."

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, stop farming and build a steel furnace in your backyard and start smelting. It was, they tried new weird sort of farming techniques that weren't tested.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  It was, it was a pretty enthusiastic campaign, you know, from the people as far as how they received it and how they got into it. Apparently, that the farmers sometimes, or people would just work late 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 over-reporting output. And as we'll see, that kind of happened again with the four pests campaign.

• 7:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was an enormous problem that China ran into in 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?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:17Josh Clark?

  So the four pest campaign itself, you might say like, okay, China's trying to industrialize and catch up to the UK. 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 in 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, to his will at least. He had a slogan called "Man must conquer nature."

• 7:50Speaker 02

  There you have it.

• 7:51Josh Clark?

  Pretty on the nose, right?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:53Josh Clark?

  And also, apparently, he was quoted back in 1958, that he wanted to "make the high mountain bow its head, make the river yield the way." And so this really kind of tied to these eradication campaigns. And make 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.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So there was some megalomania involved, for sure. But it definitely had genuine roots and ambition to be, to get rid of disease, to stop these contagions from spreading, because they were coming out of a decade in the 1940s where they had smallpox and cholera and malaria, and the infant mortality rate was like 30%. 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.

• 9:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  And getting rid of these pests, in three of the cases would 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 60,000 people. So that's why they were on the list.

• 9:25Josh Clark?

  Yes, somehow they calculated that each sparrow stole and ate about four and a half kilograms a year, which equals to about 10 pounds, which is a staggering amount of grain for one single bird to steal from, like right out of the Chinese people's mouths. So that was why sparrows were on there. You might have been sitting here the whole time going, what are you talking about with sparrows? They're the cutest 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 net essentially.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, along with other birds by accident, of course.

• 10:03Josh Clark?

  Yes, so the whole thing was essentially like an adopt a mile program, except with killing animals.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they had sanitation teams that people would organize in communities. They would go out together and hunt rats. They encouraged 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 reward people sometimes, but usually it was just like, this is something you need to get on board with to make us all healthier.

• 10:38Josh Clark?

  Exactly, and going back to that infant mortality rate, talking about making them healthier, like this is where they were coming from. That 30%, the way that it's expressed typically is number of deaths per 1,000 births. So that's 300 deaths per 1,000 births. So this was a staggering infant mortality rate 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.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And of course, in Communist 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 will lead to happiness for 10,000 generations. They would also have posters, like a positive ones, like, here's what our future is going to look like with like, 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 where they had like children's songs in kids' books, talking about killing sparrows.

• 11:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they did absolutely everything right to, to change people's views on sparrows so thoroughly. Because before they hadn't been seen as pests until those grain estimates came in.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're sparrows.

• 12:04Josh Clark?

  Exactly. So I believe the Chinese in up to 1958, 59, 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.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had, they filled out the questionnaire. How do you view sparrows? A, favorably. B, not favorably. C, don't really have an opinion.

• 12:28Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And everybody said, not favorably anymore.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  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. A, it's Communist 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 mosquitoes. So it's just really tough to quantify that.

• 12:54Josh Clark?

  Yes, but as we'll get to in a minute, I tried to quantify it and I think I did a great job.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. Does that mean there's going to be some Josh maths?

• 13:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, aces of Josh math. You ready?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Can't wait. Yeah.

• 13:07Josh Clark?

  Well, let's just jump to that, okay?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:10Josh Clark?

  We'll come back to rats in a second, but flies, let's talk about flies. One of the reasons flies were chosen is 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, uh, one of the big problem can diseases that they spread is cholera, which is not fun and it spreads very easily. Um, so flies were targeted and 220 million pounds of flies were killed.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Okay, hold on, I have a question. I gotta interrupt.

• 13:39Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Are you about to say that you found out the weight of an average fly?

• 13:43Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  To find the total number of flies out of that 220 million pounds?

• 13:47Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  You ready?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:51Josh Clark?

  First of all, I have to shout out Bing and its AI. When I said how much, uh, is, how many flies are in one pound?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:00Josh Clark?

  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.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 14:11Josh Clark?

  Thanks for the help, Bing. So I had to sludge forward and do it myself. So I looked up how much a house fly weighs. I saw 50 milligrams, I saw 10 milligrams. Okay? Uh-huh. So if you divide that, um, per pound, that equals 9,000 flies per pound. Okay? It also equals more. I'll get to that in a second. But that, so nine, so 50 milligrams of fly, which is way high, that's 9,000 flies per pound times 220 million pounds of flies equals 1.98 trillion

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 14:42Josh Clark?

  flies that were killed in just a couple of years. Mind boggling, right? Well, get this. If you adjust to a fly weighing 10 milligrams, that equals almost, that equals almost 10 trillion flies that were killed in China over the course of this four pest campaign. Just a few years. 10 trillion flies. That's, that's the numbers I'm coming up with, guys.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  That's amazing. And this wasn't a bit, I genuinely didn't know that Josh was gonna do that, but I saw the writing on the wall as soon as I knew that it was pounds of flies. I was like, I know he's gonna figure out total flies.

• 15:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I, I didn't go ahead and convert it into Big Macs, which I feel a little bad about, but you know, I still feel like I did a good job.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  All right. That's amazing. Rats, they carry a disease called skistosomiasis. 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 hidey holes and feed that to livestock is supposedly what happened.

• 15:51Josh Clark?

  That's vengeance right there. You actually take the grain that the rats stole back.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:56Josh Clark?

  Something else. So 1.5 billion rats were killed.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  How many pounds of rat is that? You gotta reverse engineer it.

• 16:03Josh Clark?

  So I would say about 0.7 billion, 0.7 billion pounds of rats. I'm gonna go with that.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  I've seen New York rats. I don't know if Chinese rats hold a candle, but those New York rats, those suckers can weigh several pounds, I feel like.

• 16:18Josh Clark?

  Oh, several pounds. Yeah. Yeah. So I stand by my, my estimate. Let's say 0.9, because not all of them are gonna weigh two pounds.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I love a rat, by the way.

• 16:28Josh Clark?

  That's what I'm saying. I'm not fully on board. I get rats really easily spread a lot of disease and they have throughout human history, but rats themselves, I don't, I don't think are problematic in like individually.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Like a pet, a pet rat? Give me that little guy and let me scratch it under the chin.

• 16:45Josh Clark?

  Super sweet.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:47Josh Clark?

  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 20 pounds per rat per year. So the writing was on the wall for rats. They were.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Well, mosquitoes, no one likes. They spread malaria, which is a bad problem, obviously. Everyone knows that mosquitoes, you know, host their larvae and wet things and puddles and spare tires and things like that, still waters. So citizens were, they were like, hey, dredge your rivers, fill your, fill these watery ditches up with dirt. Don't let water collect. Get rid of those feeding breeding grounds. They also, and this is pretty remarkable, they raised fish and ducks to specifically feed on their larvae, which is pretty impressive. And then, you know, obviously swatting them is one way, but lots of awful harmful insecticides just being sprayed everywhere.

• 17:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, this is a requisite reminiscence of the mosquito fogging truck driving down the street at night in your neighborhood in the summer. You remember that?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we didn't have those because we didn't live in neighborhoods, but I knew they existed.

• 18:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they were something. Even back then, in the 70s and 80s, it was like, we need to steer clear of those. They just looked ominous.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, the very first opening shots of my beloved documentary, Vernon, Florida, is a mosquito truck going through the town.

• 18:19Josh Clark?

  Oh, boy.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:21Josh Clark?

  So they killed, as far as China estimates, 24 million pounds of mosquitoes, or 4.354 trillion mosquitoes over the course of this campaign.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Hey, aside from the insecticide, I say hats off to that one.

• 18:36Josh Clark?

  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 mosquitoes forever in just a few generations if we adjust this gene and release these genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild. And like, it would have worked. And everyone was like, you know, I don't know if we should do that. Mosquitoes 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.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but didn't they also come back and say like, no, like, we have yet to find any, like, if mosquitoes were removed, there's no domino effect in the insect chain, like, they could really go away and everyone would be fine?

• 19:31Josh Clark?

  Yes, I do remember that, too. And before you can say anything else, I say we take a break.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  That sounds great.

• 19:38Josh Clark?

  Great. Thanks, man. I appreciate the support.

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• 22:29Speaker 02

  All right, so the fourth, I know you were just waiting with bated breath about sparrows. They, again, weren't considered pests before the Great Leap Forward, which kind of preceded this. But Mao had a very effective anti-pest campaign going, so people bought into it. And they would kill them. They would crush their little eggs. They would light firecrackers and throw them at them. They would destroy their nests. They would set up scarecrows or scare sparrows in 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,

• 23:10Speaker 02

  that the sparrows would fly until they tired and then would just drop down from the sky.

• 23:15Josh Clark?

  Right, but not dead. The people after them would go kill them by hand usually. Squish them 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, not bothering anybody, just being cute. These are the birds that the people of China were killing by hand in 1958 to 1961, I think.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're kind of finchy looking. They're very, very cute. Oh, wow. I'm actually seeing one of those propaganda posters right now that has a rat, a sparrow, a mosquito and a fly impaled on a Chinese sword.

• 24:03Josh Clark?

  Yes, that works. That makes me want to kill a sparrow.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  It's kind of a really sweet poster, actually, but I just don't like the message.

• 24:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. So as you can bet, like this led to the near extinction of sparrows in just a few years.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  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 and they ballooned and the crops were devastated. I think the World Atlas estimated that the locusts were responsible for destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of grain because of this.

• 24:53Josh Clark?

  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 50s to 1960s, you know what's coming. The Great Famine of China, it lasted from 1958 to 1961. And it is far and away the most devastating famine on, in the history of humanity, as far as recorded history goes.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:24Josh Clark?

  Estimates run from 15 million to up to 78 million. And I saw reasonable people estimating it was actually between 20 and 50 million people who starved to death from just 1958 to 1961 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.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  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, Mao refused to acknowledge that it was happening, like there is no famine. It was after everyone died, like a year later, that Mao 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 gaslighting when your leader's not even acknowledging that.

• 26:24Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  But he didn't accept, you know, he blamed it on rightists. And their failure to implement his policies correctly.

• 26:31Josh Clark?

  From what I could tell, I did not see how much he actually was aware. Part of the, 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 and tortured and murdered for giving Mao bad news, essentially. So he might have really not realized just how bad things were.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Maybe. I bet you can't lose 50 million people, though, and not just notice like traffic's better.

• 27:02Josh Clark?

  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, this famine and make it as bad as it was.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:35Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Uh, or, you know, and people to, to die at the rates of tens of millions, but um, there were, there were a few factors. One was obviously environmental factors. Uh, in 1959, there was a drought in northern China and rain and flooding in southern and eastern China. And all of these natural disasters were kind of happening at the same time, which are going to affect the grain output.

• 27:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Led to a lot of grain deficit. I think in 1959, uh, 55%, like more than half of their farmland was unusable. And in 1960, their wheat harvest was, was down 70%.

• 28:10Josh Clark?

  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 um, the famine or making it as bad as it was. And that supposedly the Soviet Union called in their debts during this famine, that the, the relations between Communist China and Communist USA. USSR had deteriorated right around this time. And so just basically to, well, to be jerks, the USSR said, hey, you know that money you owe us? We need it right now. I saw that that's not necessarily the case.

• 28:52Josh Clark?

  And someone said that the Soviet Union may have even offered for 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 longstanding talking point that came out of China at the end of the famine. When Mao finally did admit that it had happened, he blamed it in part on the USSR.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  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 led away from farming and producing steel in their backyard, you're just going to have less grain planted 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 flatware and pots and pans just gets you pig iron. It didn't result in anything that they could use for like big time construction.

• 29:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was a huge one. I mean, they were also not trained, right? They were, they just basically said, hey, create a backyard smelting furnace and here's your quota for steel every month or quarter or year. Go figure it out essentially. So not only were they paying less attention to farming, they were, they were also spending more time trying to figure this out. And then, like you said, were unsuccessful. That was, from what I saw, one of the biggest exacerbators of this whole problem because it reduced the, 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 as much.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and at the same time, they had quotas on that grain. So even though they were saying, hey, go. Go quit growing things, make steel in their 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 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.

• 31:18Josh Clark?

  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 cities need this much. It doesn't matter how much that leaves you peasant because we're feeding the cities. 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

• 32:02Josh Clark?

  tortured to death, beaten to death, murdered by the state. And I think that someone estimated that there was between 6% to 8% of the deaths, of the potentially 50 million deaths during the entire Great Leap Forward, were caused by torture, and those were mostly peasants.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  6% to 8%? That's amazing.

• 32:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Being tortured to death for basically speaking up about being left to starve to death, essentially.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  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 a comeback in China, right after this.

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• 35:27Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, so finally, finally, after a relatively short time, 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 1960. I think the whole campaign started in 1958, right?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:47Josh Clark?

  So just two to three years, they were like, oh god, this is not going well. So they, they took the sparrows off, and they said, "Bedbugs, you're up." And the bedbugs said, "Gulp."

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Can I kill a bedbug, with your permission?

• 36:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I, I, I've gotten a problem with killing bedbugs. 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?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, they, they swapped out sparrows for bedbugs. Um, eventually, they would add cockroaches to that list, much to your chagrin. Um, but they, they did study, sort of the initial years of the four pests campaign, they did study what was going on with the sparrows, and you know, whether or not it was making a difference, and their eating habits and things like that. And in 1960, uh, I guess, I don't know if this was right before or right after it ended, but they reported like, hey, we were sort of mistaken in our initial estimates. Uh, it turns out, they aren't eating as much grain as we thought. They actually eat insects, like 75% of their diet consists of insects, and about 25% is

• 36:50Speaker 02

  grain. And, um, this, this one researcher collected, along with his, his colleagues, collected a bunch of sparrows to study, and found that, hey, they, um, 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.

• 37:14Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly. I think that that was the, the, um, the research by Zheng Zujin.

• 37:21Josh Clark?

  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.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 37:29Josh Clark?

  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. But that's still far less than there was before the four pest campaign. Part of the, part of the way that they have been able to come back is China outlawed. Talk about like just getting mixed messages here. China outlawed killing sparrows after they took them off the four pest list and had said, go kill hundreds of millions of sparrows.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, drive them 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 kill more than 20 of them. It's a criminal offense.

• 38:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Isn't that crazy? That's life under an authoritarian government. Ta-da.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. They've, there's been, you know, different sort of versions of the four pest campaign over the years. It's continued. I know we mentioned the bedbugs. Uh, I think that was in the 1960s, uh, in 19, uh, starting in the eighties. Uh, rats came back on the scene as far as, uh, you know, a big pest to eradicate. And then in 1998, uh, there was a full sort of reboot. Let's go back to the four pest campaign. Remember that, that TV show we all loved back then? Let's reboot it. And new propaganda posters in 1998, like kind of like the old style one still. But this is when they added the cockroaches. So it was flies, mosquitoes, um, rats and cockroaches.

• 39:12Josh Clark?

  And that 1980s rat eradication campaign was very successful. In 1984 alone, China killed an estimated 5% of the entire global rat population. They killed so many rats, one year.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they were paying citizens in as late as 2007 to kill individual flies in certain places.

• 39:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I think in 2024, they've 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 was that?

• 39:50Speaker 02

  I think they, I think they finally, wasn't it like 2021, they finally said they were malaria-free?

• 39:55Josh Clark?

  Yes, so it did have some positive effects, at least as far as the stupid mosquitoes 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 2023, on 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.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. I believe that was a higher rate of non-communicable diseases. We're talking diabetes, cancer, psychiatric problems even than the general population, and may have also caused a decline in the male birth rate all the way through the early 1960s.

• 40:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which is really ironic considering the one-child policy, you know?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 40:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which I guess either is ironic because of the one-child policy or led to the one-child policy.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:56Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  I got nothing else. Four Pest is over.

• 41:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, hats to Emily for coming up with that. And one little lan yap, as obnoxious people call it. If you want to know what they call sparrows in China, they call them ma chia.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  I've never heard of lan yap.

• 41:13Josh Clark?

  Sure you have. I've made that joke before and you thought it was hilarious.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Really?

• 41:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's like an extra little something, like an extra little treat.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 41:23Josh Clark?

  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. And they called it a little lan yap.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 41:38Josh Clark?

  That formed my impression of the word lan yap from that point forward.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  So in that case, the cherry on top is the chocolate on the bottom.

• 41:47Josh Clark?

  Wow. Wow. Well, I think obviously Chuck just brought about listener mail.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Uh, this is joke or not, Josh. Um, so you get to answer this question. And we had a few people write in, so I think there was either some confusion of a joke, or maybe you just got something wrong. We'll see.

• 42:05Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Hey, guys. Uh, 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 got, and it got through, mainly because it was so deadpan. But see, buddy, Brian, you can never tell with Josh because he can be so deadpan. I've, I've shown over and over and over that I can't tell sometimes if he's joking. Um, here we go. Uh, 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 a group of orphans. In the film, Karloff hosts three different horror stories, but none are about a regatta or orphans. Uh, Boris Karloff as an animated talking boat that saved orphans would be amazing. At any rate,

• 42:49Speaker 02

  maybe I'm wrong and Josh was joking and Chuck just missed it. Or it was explained as such and I missed it, but I wanted to pass it along. Rock on. That is from Brian in Brookline, New Hampshire.

• 43:00Josh Clark?

  Nice. Thanks, Brian or Ryan?

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Brian.

• 43:03Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Brian.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  So what is it?

• 43:05Josh Clark?

  Uh, let me just walk us through a couple of points real quick and I think it'll become clear.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:09Josh Clark?

  One is that Black Sabbath, the band, would name themselves after a movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Seems like a joke.

• 43:20Josh Clark?

  And secondly, that a movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans is called Black Sabbath. It was totally, totally made up.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  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?

• 43:37Josh Clark?

  I made that up from whole cloth. I don't, I don't think there's a movie like that. I can believe it, but I, I've never heard of one.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Well, then in that case, my friend, I give you the improv award for the month because that you sold it and it was pretty great.

• 43:50Josh Clark?

  Thank you. I appreciate that. That means the world to me.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  I couldn't have made up such an outlandish. Movie plot on the, on the, off the dome like that.

• 44:00Josh Clark?

  Nice. Thank you. And thank you too, 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.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  It's very satisfying.

• 44:10Josh Clark?

  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 [email protected].

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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  What's that?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  My fresh detector.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Uh, your what?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  What is it detecting?

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Apparently we celebrate.

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