What was the Four Pests Campaign?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know – "What was the Four Pests Campaign?"

Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Date: September 16, 2025
Podcast: iHeartPodcasts, Stuff You Should Know

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Overview

This episode explores China’s infamous Four Pests Campaign—a massive, government-led eradication movement launched during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) under Mao Zedong. The campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows with the aim of eliminating disease, saving grain, and exemplifying Mao’s belief in conquering nature. Josh and Chuck explain the ecological and human consequences, succinctly tying the campaign to the catastrophic Great Chinese Famine. Sprinkled throughout are engaging asides, signature humor, and deep context about authoritarian policy, propaganda, and unintended environmental effects.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Origins and Context of the Campaign

• Listener Suggestion & Personal Connection:
  Chuck introduces the idea, crediting his wife. Banter ensues about killing pests (01:15–02:23).
• Precedents in China:
  Pre-Communist China already had fly-eradication campaigns, e.g., students delivering dead flies as proof; more than 10 million killed in one such program (03:05–04:06).
• Tied to the Great Leap Forward:
  The Four Pests Campaign was part of a broader revolutionary push for rapid industrialization, focusing on steel output and agricultural productivity. The government’s approach was abrupt: “Stop doing this and start doing this.” (04:36–05:36)

Why These Four Targets?

• Rats, Flies, Mosquitoes:
  Chosen for spreading deadly diseases like smallpox, cholera, and malaria. Targeting these was part of broader health and sanitation measures (07:48–08:28).
• Sparrows:
  Unlike the others, sparrows were listed for their supposed role as "grain thieves.” Calculations (often exaggerated) claimed each sparrow consumed vast amounts of grain annually—up to 10 pounds per bird, allegedly enough to feed 60,000 people (08:52–09:28).

Methods of Eradication

• Mass Mobilization:
  Local teams, children, and individuals were incentivized to kill the pests through rallies, school assignments, propaganda posters, and rewards. Killing pests became patriotic duty (09:38–10:40).
• Propaganda:
  Highly effective anti-sparrow propaganda changed public perception, enlisting even children with songs and books (11:20–11:48).

Estimated Kill Counts (with “Josh Math”)

• Flies:
  State-reported: 220 million pounds of flies.
  Josh’s calculations:
  • At 50mg/fly: 1.98 trillion flies
  • At 10mg/fly (more accurate): ~10 trillion flies
    (12:22–14:35; notable quote: “That equals almost 10 trillion flies that were killed in China over the course of this Four Pest Campaign ... Mind boggling, right?” – Josh, 14:32)
• Rats:
  1.5 billion rats. Estimated 0.7–0.9 billion pounds. Rats considered especially destructive for disease spread and for allegedly stealing up to 20 pounds of grain per year per rat (15:19–16:34).
• Mosquitoes:
  24 million pounds, or roughly 4.4 trillion mosquitoes (17:49).
  • Methods included swatting, draining standing water, mass chemical spraying, introducing larva-eating fish and ducks (16:34–18:00).
• Sparrows:
  No precise kill count, but near extinction. Tactics included destruction of nests, firecrackers, shooting, and organized mass clamor (banging pots, shouting) to force sparrows to exhaustion, after which they were killed by hand (21:44–23:03; “...make such a racket in the streets, banging pots and pans and yelling and screaming that the sparrows would fly until they tired and then would just drop down from the sky.” – Chuck, 22:24).

Unintended Consequences: Ecological Collapse & Famine

• Ecological Backfire:
  The extinction of sparrows devastated the balance of the local ecosystem—they had naturally suppressed locust populations. Without sparrows, locusts multiplied and decimated grain crops (23:36–24:09).
• The Great Chinese Famine (1958–1961):
  • Up to 20–50 million deaths; most severe famine in recorded history (24:09).
  • Exacerbated by environmental factors (droughts, floods), failed agricultural experiments, farmers diverted to steel production, and misreported grain output leading to disastrous food shortages (26:51–31:37).
  • Most deaths were rural, while cities were prioritized for food and insulated from crisis.
  • Suppression: Peasants who reported food shortages were tortured or killed. Estimates suggest 6–8% of famine deaths were due to torture, not starvation (31:37–31:47).

The End and Legacy of the Campaign

• Pulling Sparrows from the List:
  By 1960, China realized sparrows were critical insect predators. Research revealed sparrows ate far more insects than grain; the government switched to targeting bedbugs, and later, cockroaches (34:30–36:17; “...actually, you’re going to go to jail if you killed more than 20 of them. It’s a criminal offense.” – Chuck, 37:15).
• Reintroduction:
  Sparrows were imported from the USSR; their populations slowly recovered but remain below pre-campaign levels (36:32–37:31).
• Ongoing Mass Campaigns:
  Revivals targeting new pests (e.g., rats in the 1980s, cockroaches from the 90s, renewed mosquito campaigns in 2024). Examples: In 1984 alone, an estimated 5% of the world’s rats were killed in China (38:14–38:30).

Long-Term Health Impact

• Studies showed the famine’s survivors have increased rates of non-communicable diseases (diabetes, cancer, psychiatric disorders) and a reduced male birth rate that lingered into the 1960s (39:29–39:46).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Mao’s Motive:
  “He almost had like a contempt for nature and a real, like, inner desire to dominate nature and bend it to human will. ... a slogan called ‘man must conquer nature.’ That’s pretty on the nose.” – Josh (06:44–07:48)
• On Propaganda:
  “They would say things like: it will lead to happiness for 10,000 generations.” – Chuck (10:40)
• On Calculating Flies:
  “At 50 milligrams a fly ... that’s 1.98 trillion flies ... If you adjust to a fly weighing 10 milligrams ... almost 10 trillion flies … Mind boggling, right?” – Josh (13:27–14:35)
• Describing the Anti-Sparrow Tactics:
  “...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 and then would just drop down from the sky.” – Chuck (22:24)
• Ecological Backfire:
  “Sparrows eat locusts, and locusts are a true pest. So without the sparrows, the locusts … ballooned and the crops were devastated.” – Chuck (23:36)
• On Mass Suffering:
  “Estimates run from 15 million to up to 78 million ... actually between 20 and 50 million people who starved to death ... That's how bad the famine was.” – Josh (24:09)
• On Irony:
  “China outlawed killing sparrows after they took them off the four pest list ... and had said, go kill hundreds of millions of sparrows.” – Josh (37:15)

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Important Segments and Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------|-------------| | Intro & Personal Connections | 01:15–02:23 | | Historical Precedents | 03:05–04:06 | | Connection to Great Leap Forward | 04:36–05:36 | | Four Pests: Disease, Grain, and Propaganda | 07:48–10:40 | | Changing Perception of Sparrows | 11:20–11:48 | | Josh Math: Calculating Pest Kill Stats | 12:22–14:35 | | Methods for Each Pest | 16:34–18:00 | | Sparrows: Mass Eradication Tactics | 21:44–23:03 | | Ecological Disaster: Locusts Rise | 23:36–24:09 | | The Great Famine | 24:09–26:42 | | Systemic Causes and Cover-ups | 26:51–31:47 | | Ending the Campaign; Sparrows’ Rehabilitation| 34:30–37:31 | | Revival of Campaigns Against Other Pests | 38:14–38:53 | | Famine’s Lasting Health Effects | 39:29–39:51 |

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Closing Notes

The episode highlights how the Four Pests Campaign, born out of overzealous ambition and authoritarian faith in mass mobilization, exemplifies the dangers of large-scale attempts to "conquer nature." Misguided science and propaganda led to a massive ecological backfire, contributing directly and indirectly to one of history’s greatest human tragedies. Yet, the episode maintains a lively, conversational tone, making dense historical material engaging and digestible.

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Stuff You Should Know demonstrates once again that “controlling nature”—especially by fiat—can have catastrophic, unforeseen costs.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

No. But I do have to say you judged me pretty hard on the cockroach. And while just very casually talking about how much you would kill a mosquito in ticks and fleas. But, oh, not the cockroach. Chuck.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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, God's gift to insects.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, my boundaries apply to all. Yeah. Okay, moving forward, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 head 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But apparently it worked pretty good. And then they did this at other times in the 1920s and 30s where they would incentivize, 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. So there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this.

[Josh 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. We don't have flies anymore, suckers, because we get rid of them. We takes care of business, I think, is how they put it. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 in. There are lots of ways they wanted to do this, but mainly to outdo them in steel production.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, like stop farming and build a steel furnace in your backyard and start smelting. They tried new weird sort of farming techniques that weren't tested. It was a pretty enthusiastic campaign from the people as far as how they received it and how they got into it. Apparently that 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 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 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 Pest campaign.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So the 4Pest 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. 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, to dominate nature and bend it to human will. To his will, at least. He had a slogan called man must conquer nature. That's pretty on the nose, right? Yeah. 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 these eradication campaigns. And make no mistake, the point was to get rid of every fly, every, every rat, every mosquito and every sparrow in all of China. So this eradication campaign really kind of fit into that, that viewpoint that he held.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, to stop these contagions from spreading, because they were, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. Somehow they calculated that each sparrow stole and ate about four and a half kilograms a year, which equals to about ten 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 dragnet, essentially.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Along with other birds. By accident, of course.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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 reward people sometimes, but usually it was just like, this is something you need to get on board with to make us all healthier.

[Josh 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 1000 births. So that's 300 deaths per 1000 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 positive ones, like, here's what our future is going to look like with farms that are flourishing and industry that is doing great, and all you have to do is kill these pests. It even filtered down to the level of children, where they had children's songs and kids books talking about killing sparrows.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they're sparrows.

[Josh 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, we'll. We'll kill sparrows, no problem. Because that propaganda campaign was so effective.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly. And everybody said not favorably anymore.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, Aces of Josh Math. You ready?

[Chuck Bryant]

Can't wait.

[Josh Clark]

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 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, one of the big problem diseases that they spread is cholera, which is not fun and it spreads very easily. So flies were targeted in. 220 million pounds of flies were killed.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 £220 million?

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Amazing.

[Josh Clark]

Are you ready? Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I have to shout out bing. And it's AI. When I said, how much is how many flies are in one pound?

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

I guess I actually put one to two pounds. I tried to take the shortcut, Bing comes back with 1 to 2 pounds of flies. Biomass equals 1 to 2 pounds of flies. Thanks for the help, Bing. So I had to sledge forward and do it myself. So I looked up how much a house fly weighs. I saw 50 milligrams. I saw 10 milligrams. Okay, so if you divide that 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 at 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 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 the numbers I'm coming up with, guys.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, that's amazing. Rats, they carry a disease called schistosomiasis. I probably mispronounce 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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Something else. So 1.5 billion rats were killed.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

So I would say about 0.7 billion. 7 billion pounds of rats. I'm going to go with that.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

I love a rat, by the way.

[Josh 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, like a pet.

[Chuck Bryant]

A pet rat. Give me that little guy and let me scratch it under the chin.

[Josh Clark]

Super sweet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

They were, well, mosquitoes no one likes. They spread malaria, which is a bad problem. Obviously, everyone knows that mosquitoes 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 these watery ditches up with dirt. Don't let water collect. Get rid of those breeding grounds. They also, and this is pretty remarkable, they raised 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.

[Josh 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Oh, boy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh 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 because. And so he didn't pull the trigger on it, but some, I think like Yukon or something. Professor had figured out exactly how to do it.

[Chuck Bryant]

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?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

That sounds great.

[Josh Clark]

Great. Thanks man. I appreciate the support.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh 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're not familiar with sparrows and you are not driving right now, go look up sparrows. They're the best. 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 1958-1961, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they're kind of finchy looking, just, they're very, very cute. Oh, wow.

[Josh Clark]

Super cute.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

So here's the problem is with the sparrows. Sparrows eat locusts, and locusts are a true pest. So without the sparrows, the locusts are 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.

[Josh 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. Yeah, um, 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 44 pest campaign and the effect of removing sparrows from the ecosystem.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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 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 gaslighting when your leader's not even acknowledging that.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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 and tortured and murdered for giving Mao bad news, essentially. So he might have really not realized just how bad things were, maybe.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or, you know, and people to die at the rates of tens of millions. But there were a few factors. One was obviously environmental factors. 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, led to a lot of grain deficit. I think in 1959, 55%, like more than half of their farmland was unusable. And in 1960, their wheat harvest was down 70%.

[Josh 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 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 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, all that money you owe us, 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 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. But that is a long standing 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 at 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.

[Josh 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's. 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 as much.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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 gonna 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 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And not only would they export it, the grain surplus was considered what the cities 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 tortured to death, beaten to death, murdered by the state. And I think 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

6 to 8%. That's amazing.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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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[Josh 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? 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 bed bug said, gulp.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can I kill a bedbug with your permission?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I, I, I've got no 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, yeah, they swapped out sparrows for bedbugs. 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 whether or not it was making a difference in their eating habits and things like that. And in 1960, 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 75% of their diet consists of insects. And about 25% is grain. And this one researcher collected, along with his colleagues, collected a bunch of sparrows to study and found that, hey, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly. I think that that was the, the, the research by Zheng Zhujian. Pretty sure that's as close as I can get. His research was what led to the sparrows being taken off of the Four Pest Campaign.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 20 of them. It's a criminal offense.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. There's been different sort of versions of the for Pest campaign over the years. That's continued. I know we mentioned the bedbugs. I think that was in the 1960s. Starting in the 80s, rats came back on the scene as far as, you know, big pest to eradicate. And then in 1998, there was a full sort of reboot. Let's go back to the Four Pests 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, rats and.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think they. I think they finally. Wasn't it like 2021? They finally said they were malaria free.

[Josh 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 4 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which is really ironic considering the one child policy, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which I guess either is ironic because of the one child policy or led to the one child policy. Yeah. You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

I got nothing else. Four pests is over.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Hat tip to Emily for coming up with that. And one little lanyap, as obnoxious people call it. If you want to know what they call sparrows in China, they call them ma chao.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've never heard of lagnop.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It's like an extra little something, like an extra little treat. Okay. 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. They called it a little lagniappe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Huh.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

This is joke or not, Josh. So you get to answer this question. We had a few people write in, so I think there was either some confusion of a joke or maybe you.

[Josh Clark]

Just got something wrong.

[Chuck Bryant]

We'll see.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, guys. The reason I'm writing is cause 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 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. 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 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 as such and I miss it, but I wanted to pass it along. Rock on. That is from Brian in Brookline, New Hampshire.

[Josh Clark]

Nice. Thanks, Brian or Ryan?

[Chuck Bryant]

Brian.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks, Brian.

[Chuck Bryant]

So what is it?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay?

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Seems like a joke.

[Josh 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 made up.

[Chuck Bryant]

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?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

I couldn't have made up such a outlandish movie plot off the dome like that.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's very satisfying.

[Josh Clark]

It was very satisfying. If you want to be like Brian and see set us up for a satisfying conversation. We love that kind of stuff. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

This is an I Heart podcast.