What was the Four Pests Campaign?

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1:01John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? Yes. Health stuff is about learning, laughing and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:49Hey, 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. 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. Oh, nice. She gave me the idea, and I was like, oh, yeah. I looked into it a little bit. It was like, yeah, this will be good. That's funny. I wondered if you had thought of it because of you killing the cockroach recently on air.

2:31No, 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 fleas, but oh, not the cockroach, Chuck. No. Was I a little harsh? I'm sorry. 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. 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.

3:14And 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. 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 was not the first time something like this had been tried, and it's been tried since then over there as well.

3:56in 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. Yeah. 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.

4:37So there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this. 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. Yeah, the four PESA, we need to sort of set the stage because it's kind of rooted in the Great Leap Forward.

5:15And 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 U.K.'s industrial output in less than 15 years. Mainly in, there were lots of ways they wanted to do this, but mainly to outdo them in steel production. 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.

6:05You weren't transitioning into anything. It was stop doing this and start doing this. 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 like, you know, make as much steel and grow as much grain as you could.

6:45But 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 For Pest campaign. 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? So the four pest campaign itself, you might say like, okay, China's trying to industrialize and catch up to the UK.

7:25Who 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. Yeah. 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. There you have it. 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.

8:08And 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. Yeah, for sure. So there was some megalomania involved for sure, but it definitely had genuine roots and an ambition 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.

8:56But 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 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. 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.

9:46So 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. Yeah. Along with other birds by accident, of course. Yes. So the whole thing was essentially like an adopt-a-mile program, except with killing animals. 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.

10:23But 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. 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.

11:02And 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. 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 like like farms that are flourishing and industry that is doing great.

11:43And 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. 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. Yeah, they're sparrows. 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 kill sparrows, no problem, because that propaganda campaign was so effective.

12:23Yeah, they had, they filled out the questionnaire. How do you view sparrows? A, favorably. B, not favorably. C, don't really have an opinion. Exactly. And everybody said not favorably anymore. 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. Yes, but as we'll get to in a minute, I tried to quantify it, and I think I did a great job.

13:01Oh, boy. Does that mean there's going to be some Josh Maths? Yeah. Aces of Josh Math. You ready? Can't wait. 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 and 220 million pounds of flies were killed.

13:39Okay, hold on. I have a question. I've got to 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 220 million pounds? Yes. Amazing. Are you ready? Yeah, yeah. First of all, I have to shout out Bing and its AI when I said 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. 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.

14:18I 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 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 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.

15:09That's amazing. And this wasn't a bit, I genuinely didn't know that Josh was going to 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 going to figure out total flies. 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. All right. That's amazing. Rats, they carry a disease called schistosomiasis. 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.

15:53That's vengeance right there. You actually take the grain that the rats stole back? Yeah. Something else. So 1.5 billion rats were killed. How many pounds of rat is that? You got to reverse engineer it. So I would say about 0.7 billion pounds of rats. I'm going to go with that. 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. Oh, several pounds. Yeah. Yeah. So I stand by my estimate. Let's say 0.9, because not all of them are going to weigh two pounds. I love a rat, by the way. That's what I'm saying.

16:31I'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 think are problematic individually. Like a pet rat, give me that little guy and let me scratch it under the chin. 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 9 kilograms or 20 pounds per rat per year. So the writing was on the wall for rats. They were... Well, mosquitoes, no one likes.

17:12They 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.

17:52Yeah, 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? Yeah, we didn't have those because we didn't live in neighborhoods, but I knew they existed. Yeah, they were something. Even back then in the 70s and 80s, it was like, well, you need to steer clear of those. They just looked ominous. Yeah, the very first opening shots of my beloved documentary, Vernon, Florida, is a mosquito truck going through the town. Oh, boy. Yeah. So they killed, as far as China estimates, 24 million pounds of mosquitoes or 4.354 trillion mosquitoes over the course of this campaign.

18:34Hey, aside from the insecticide, I say hats off to that one. 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. 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.

19:11And 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. 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. Yes, I do remember that too. And before you can say anything else, I say we take a break. That sounds great. Great. Thanks, man. I appreciate the support.

19:56New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt And I'm Joel We are from the How to Money podcast And every week we help you to spend smarter, save more And make sense of what's going on out there If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money We're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts Or wherever you get your podcasts Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally And I'm Hurricane DeBolu It's a new year and on the podcast Health Stuff We're resetting the way we talk about our health Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be.

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22:45All 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.

23:32Right, 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. Yeah, they're kind of finchy looking. Just 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.

24:20Yes, that works. That makes me want to kill a sparrow. It's kind of a really sweet poster, actually, but I just don't like the message. Yeah, for sure. So as you can bet, like this led to the near extinction of sparrows in just a few years. 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.

25:10Right. 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 in the history of humanity, as far as recorded history goes. 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.

25:59And some people tie that back to, at least in part, the Four Pests Campaign and the effect of removing sparrows from the ecosystem. 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 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 is not even acknowledging that.

26:41Right. But he didn't accept, you know, he blamed it on rightists and their failure to implement his policies correctly. 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. I bet you can't lose 50 million people, though, and not just notice like traffic's better. Well, that's the other thing, too.

27:21Most 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 make it as bad as it was. 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.