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What was the Four Pests Campaign? · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
0:11
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.
0:14
Speaker 2: It's just us and that's okay because we are going
0:17
Speaker 2: to do our best today pronouncing Chinese words, which is
0:20
Speaker 2: always a laugh riot. If you're a fan of the.
0:23
Speaker 1: Podcast, Yeah, you can take those, my friend, because I'm
0:27
Speaker 1: meant to look up the pronunciations and I didn't get
0:29
Speaker 1: a chance to. But this topic about the four pests
0:32
Speaker 1: campaign comes to you from listener, actually non listener, Emily Bryant,
0:38
Speaker 1: my wife, No nice. She gave me the idea and
0:41
Speaker 1: I was like, oh yeah, I looked into a little bit.
0:43
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, this will be good.
0:45
Speaker 2: That's funny. I wondered if you had thought of it
0:47
Speaker 2: because of you killing the cockroach recently on air.
0:52
Speaker 1: No, but I do have to say you judge me
0:55
Speaker 1: pretty hard on the cockroach, and while just very casually
1:02
Speaker 1: talking about how much you would kill a mosquito and
1:05
Speaker 1: ticks and flees, but oh not the cockroach, Chuck.
1:09
Speaker 2: No, was I a little harsh?
1:11
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, No, you weren't harsh, but I was like,
1:13
Speaker 1: wait a minute, you're killing three out of fourties and
1:15
Speaker 1: acting like you're, you know, gods get the insects.
1:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, my boundaries apply to all. Yeah, okay, we're not
1:25
Speaker 2: talking about cockroaches yet, we're talking about rats, mosquitoes, flies.
1:32
Speaker 2: I have an issue with rats, but I get where
1:34
Speaker 2: they're coming from. And sparrows. These were the four pests
1:39
Speaker 2: that made up of the Four Pests campaign carried out
1:42
Speaker 2: at the end of the fifties beginning of the nineteen
1:44
Speaker 2: sixties in communist China, which newspapers at the time called
1:48
Speaker 2: Red China. And it was an enormously successful communist eradication
1:56
Speaker 2: campaign that was bent on controlling nature. And did it
2:00
Speaker 2: ever work.
2:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean successful in one way, very destructive in another.
2:06
Speaker 1: And we'll get to all that. Obviously, we're talking about
2:09
Speaker 1: the leader at the time, mal Zedong, And this had
2:13
Speaker 1: was not the first time something like this had been tried,
2:16
Speaker 1: and it's been tried since then over there as well.
2:18
Speaker 1: In the nineteen twenties and thirties. In China, they had
2:21
Speaker 1: fly killing campaigns. In mid nineteen twenties, it was a
2:26
Speaker 1: fly campaign such that the Southeast University in Nanjing was
2:32
Speaker 1: it was very effective and they were you know, this
2:34
Speaker 1: is very much like anecdotal, like there were practically no
2:37
Speaker 1: flies there all summer. Yeah, but apparently it worked pretty good.
2:41
Speaker 1: And then they did this at other times in the
2:42
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and thirties where they were incentivized, like middle
2:46
Speaker 1: schoolers to go out and kill flies and bring them
2:48
Speaker 1: in and show them to their teachers and like a
2:50
Speaker 1: little matchbox, let's say, and things like that. But apparently
2:54
Speaker 1: that resulted in more than ten million dead flies. So
2:59
Speaker 1: there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this.
3:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, so much so that I actually saw a contemporaneous
3:05
Speaker 2: newspaper account that was talking about the Four Pests campaign
3:09
Speaker 2: when it kicked off, and the newspapers is an American
3:12
Speaker 2: newspaper just kind of chied it and said the fact
3:14
Speaker 2: that they're having to include flies belies the boasts that
3:19
Speaker 2: there were no flies in China. So apparently after these
3:22
Speaker 2: eradication campaigns, I told the rest of the world, we
3:25
Speaker 2: don't have flies anymore, suckers, because we get rid of it.
3:28
Speaker 2: We takes care of business, I think, is how they
3:30
Speaker 2: put it.
3:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Four Pests that we need to sort of
3:33
Speaker 1: set the stage because it's kind of rooted in the
3:35
Speaker 1: Great Leap Forward and that was a very ambitious campaign
3:40
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight January nineteen fifty eight that had
3:44
Speaker 1: a lot of initiatives, but the real goal, the kind
3:46
Speaker 1: of stated goal, was to industrialize and to overtake the
3:51
Speaker 1: UK's industrial output in less than fifteen years, mainly in
3:57
Speaker 1: There are lots of ways they wanted to do this,
3:59
Speaker 1: but mainly to outdo them and steel production.
4:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just a quick reminder, the UK is where
4:06
Speaker 2: the industrial revolution began. So this was beyond ambitious for China,
4:11
Speaker 2: especially from the place that they were coming from. So
4:15
Speaker 2: MAO was extremely ambitious, I guess. And to do something
4:20
Speaker 2: like this that required really huge, sweeping changes and for
4:25
Speaker 2: them to happen immediately. You weren't transitioning into anything. It
4:29
Speaker 2: was stop doing this and start doing this.
4:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, like stop farming and build a steel furnace in
4:36
Speaker 1: your backyard and start smelting. Was tried new weird sort
4:41
Speaker 1: of farming techniques that weren't tested. It was. It was
4:45
Speaker 1: a pretty enthusiastic campaign, you know, from the people, just
4:48
Speaker 1: how they received it and how they got into it.
4:50
Speaker 1: Apparently that farmers sometimes or people would just work late
4:55
Speaker 1: into the night and they called it catching the moon
4:56
Speaker 1: and stars and public officials were they would issue these
5:01
Speaker 1: steel and grain quotas to like, you know, make as
5:04
Speaker 1: much steel and grow as much grain as you could.
5:06
Speaker 1: But they were very unrealistic quotas. They were not able
5:09
Speaker 1: to fulfill those, and in that time, with you know,
5:13
Speaker 1: this sort of idealistic, authoritative approach to government, they were
5:18
Speaker 1: over reporting output. And as we'll see, that kind of
5:22
Speaker 1: happened again with a four pest campaign.
5:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was an enormous problem that China ran into,
5:28
Speaker 2: and almost immediately after they began the four Pest campaign,
5:32
Speaker 2: and even though they were kind of parallel to one another,
5:36
Speaker 2: they were definitely intertwined at least to some degree. Right, Yeah,
5:40
Speaker 2: So the four Pest campaign itself, you might say, like, Okay,
5:44
Speaker 2: China's trying to industrialize and catch up to the UK,
5:47
Speaker 2: who cares about flies and sparrows? And it turns out
5:51
Speaker 2: that Mao cared a lot about flies and sparrows and
5:54
Speaker 2: other pests. He and I've noticed this before, and a
5:57
Speaker 2: lot of the stuff he talked about, he almost had
6:00
Speaker 2: like a contempt for nature and a real like inner
6:03
Speaker 2: desire to dominate nature and bend it to human will,
6:09
Speaker 2: to his will. At least he had a slogan called
6:12
Speaker 2: man Must Conquer Nature. Yeah, pretty on the nose, right, Yeah.
6:16
Speaker 2: And also apparently he was quoted back in nineteen fifty
6:20
Speaker 2: eight that he wanted to make the high mountain bow
6:23
Speaker 2: its head, make the river yield the way, and so
6:26
Speaker 2: this really kind of tied these eradication campaigns. And make
6:30
Speaker 2: no mistake, the point was to get rid of every fly,
6:33
Speaker 2: every rat, every mosquito, and every sparrow in all of China.
6:39
Speaker 2: So this eradication campaign really kind of fit into that
6:42
Speaker 2: viewpoint that he held.
6:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, So there was some megalomania involved, for sure,
6:48
Speaker 1: but it definitely had genuine roots and amibition to be
6:53
Speaker 1: to get rid of disease, to stop these contagions from spreading,
6:58
Speaker 1: because they were out of a decade in the nineteen
7:02
Speaker 1: forties where they had smallpox and cholera and malaria and
7:07
Speaker 1: the infant mortality rate was like thirty percent. So there
7:11
Speaker 1: was definitely you know, they reacted with these big, large
7:14
Speaker 1: scale vaccination drives, sanitation initiatives, but getting rid of these
7:19
Speaker 1: pests they thought could get rid of the things that
7:21
Speaker 1: were causing these diseases to begin with. Yeah, and getting
7:25
Speaker 1: rid of these pests, and three of the cases would
7:27
Speaker 1: get rid of these diseases to begin with. In the
7:30
Speaker 1: case of sparrows, they're not spreading disease, but he sparrows
7:35
Speaker 1: are grain thieves. They eat grain, and so they had
7:38
Speaker 1: these wild estimates that sparrows could, like the food they
7:43
Speaker 1: lost to grain by sparrows could feed up to sixty
7:46
Speaker 1: thousand people. So that's why they were on the list.
7:48
Speaker 2: Yes, somehow they calculated that each sparrow stole in eight
7:53
Speaker 2: about four and a half kilograms a year, which equals
7:58
Speaker 2: to about ten pounds, which is a staging amount of
8:00
Speaker 2: grain for one single bird to steal from, like right
8:05
Speaker 2: out of the Chinese people's mouths. So that was why
8:09
Speaker 2: sparrow's were on there. You might have been sitting here
8:11
Speaker 2: the whole time, going, what are you talking about with
8:13
Speaker 2: sparrow's the little bird, They're the greatest of all birds potentially,
8:18
Speaker 2: why would you want to kill sparrows? And sparrows just
8:21
Speaker 2: got wrapped up into this big drag night essentially.
8:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, along with other birds by accident, of course.
8:27
Speaker 2: Yes, so the whole thing was essentially like an adopt
8:30
Speaker 2: a mile program, except with killing animals.
8:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they had sanitation teams that people would
8:37
Speaker 1: organize in communities. They would go out together and hunt rats.
8:42
Speaker 1: They encourage kids, of course to do this, but just individually,
8:45
Speaker 1: they were encouraging people like, hey, kill every mosquito you
8:49
Speaker 1: can find, kill every fly that comes near you. It's
8:52
Speaker 1: your patriotic duty to do so. They would incentivize and
8:55
Speaker 1: reward people sometimes, but usually it was just like, this
8:58
Speaker 1: is something you need to get on board with.
9:00
Speaker 2: Make us all healthier, exactly, And going back to that
9:04
Speaker 2: infant mortality rate, talking about making them healthier, like, this
9:07
Speaker 2: is where they were coming from. That thirty percent. The
9:10
Speaker 2: way that it's expressed typically is number of deaths per
9:13
Speaker 2: one thousand berths, So that's three hundred deaths per one
9:17
Speaker 2: thousand berths. So this was an staggering infant mortality rate
9:22
Speaker 2: that they were dealing with, and it kind of drives
9:25
Speaker 2: home like, Okay, this was even more ambitious than it
9:29
Speaker 2: seems on its face, because not only are they trying
9:31
Speaker 2: to leap forward, they're really having to come from a
9:34
Speaker 2: deficit to even begin to leap.
9:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, And of course in communists China, how
9:39
Speaker 1: are you going to get this ball rolling through government propaganda?
9:43
Speaker 1: It was a big, big part of mobilizing people to
9:45
Speaker 1: do this stuff. They had posters just sort of encouraging
9:49
Speaker 1: people to kill the pest. They would say things like
9:52
Speaker 1: it would lead to happiness for ten thousand generations. They
9:55
Speaker 1: would also have posters like positive ones like here's what
9:59
Speaker 1: our future is going to look like with like farms
10:02
Speaker 1: that are flourishing and industry that is doing great, and
10:05
Speaker 1: all you have to do is is kill these pests.
10:09
Speaker 1: It even filtered down to the level of children. They
10:11
Speaker 1: had like children's songs and kids books talking about killing sparrows.
10:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, they did absolutely everything right to change people's views
10:21
Speaker 2: on sparrows so thoroughly, because before they hadn't been seen
10:24
Speaker 2: as pests until those grain estimates came in.
10:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're sparrows exactly.
10:28
Speaker 2: So I believe the Chinese in up to nineteen fifty
10:32
Speaker 2: eight fifty nine viewed sparrows pretty normally, and then all
10:37
Speaker 2: of a sudden, the whole country was like, yes, well,
10:39
Speaker 2: we'll kill sparrows, no problem, because that propaganda campaign was
10:43
Speaker 2: so effective.
10:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, they had they filled out the questionnaire how do
10:47
Speaker 1: you view sparrows A favorably B not favorably? See don't
10:51
Speaker 1: really have an opinion.
10:54
Speaker 2: And everybody said not favorably anymore.
10:57
Speaker 1: So we should give the old grain of salt here.
11:00
Speaker 1: As far as the numbers we're about to start talking about,
11:02
Speaker 1: it is very hard for a few reasons, as it's
11:05
Speaker 1: communists China, so any statistics need to have the grain
11:08
Speaker 1: of salt that they put out. And also we're talking
11:12
Speaker 1: about killing individual flies and mosquitos, so it's just really
11:16
Speaker 1: tough to quantify that.
11:18
Speaker 2: Yes, but as we'll get to in a minute, I
11:20
Speaker 2: tried to quantify it, and I think I did a
11:22
Speaker 2: great job.
11:23
Speaker 1: Oh boy, does that mean there's going to be some
11:25
Speaker 1: Josh maths.
11:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, aces of Josh math You ready?
11:29
Speaker 1: Yeah? Wait?
11:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well let's just jump to that. Okay, Okay, we'll
11:33
Speaker 2: come back to rats in a second. But flies, let's
11:36
Speaker 2: talk about flies. One of the reasons flies were chosen
11:38
Speaker 2: because they transfer all sorts of diseases because they like
11:41
Speaker 2: to hang out on poop, and then they like to
11:43
Speaker 2: go hang out on food that people eat. One of
11:45
Speaker 2: the big problems, one of the big problem diseases that
11:49
Speaker 2: they spread as cholera, which is not fun and it
11:52
Speaker 2: spreads very easily. So flies were targeted in two hundred
11:56
Speaker 2: and twenty million pounds of flies were killed.
12:00
Speaker 1: Okay, hold on, I have a question, I got it. Interrupt. Okay,
12:03
Speaker 1: are you about to say that you found out the
12:05
Speaker 1: weight of an average fly to find the total number
12:08
Speaker 1: of flies out of that two hundred and twenty million pounds? Yes, amazing?
12:12
Speaker 2: You ready?
12:13
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah?
12:15
Speaker 2: First of all, I have to shout out being and
12:18
Speaker 2: it's ai. When I said how much is how many
12:21
Speaker 2: flies are in one pound? I guess I actually put
12:24
Speaker 2: one to two pounds. I tried to take the shortcut.
12:27
Speaker 2: Bing comes back with one to two pounds of flies.
12:30
Speaker 2: Biomass equals one to two pounds of flies. Say thanks
12:34
Speaker 2: for the help, Bing. So I had to sledge forward
12:36
Speaker 2: and do it myself. So I looked up how much
12:38
Speaker 2: a house fly weighs. I saw fifty milligrams. I saw
12:41
Speaker 2: ten milligrams. Okay, So if you divide that per pound,
12:46
Speaker 2: that equals nine thousand flies per pound. Okay, it also
12:51
Speaker 2: equals more. I'll get to that in a second. But
12:53
Speaker 2: that so nice. So at fifty milligrams a fly, which
12:56
Speaker 2: is way high, that's nine thousand flies per pound. Types
12:59
Speaker 2: two hundred and twenty million pounds of flies equals one
13:03
Speaker 2: point nine to eight trillion flies that were killed in
13:07
Speaker 2: just a couple of years. Mind boggling. Right, we'll get this.
13:11
Speaker 2: If you adjust to a fly weighing ten milligrams, the
13:16
Speaker 2: ables almost the equals almost ten trillion flies that were
13:21
Speaker 2: killed in China over the course of this four pest campaign.
13:25
Speaker 1: Just a few years.
13:26
Speaker 2: Ten trillion flies. That's that's the numbers I'm coming up with. Guys.
13:31
Speaker 1: That's amazing. And this wasn't a bit. I genuinely didn't
13:34
Speaker 1: know that Josh was going to do that, but I
13:36
Speaker 1: saw the riding on the wall. As soon as I
13:37
Speaker 1: knew that it was pounds of flies, I was like,
13:39
Speaker 1: I know he's going to figure out total flies.
13:41
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I didn't go ahead and convert it into
13:43
Speaker 2: big max, which I feel a little bit about, but
13:45
Speaker 2: you know, I still feel like I did a good job.
13:49
Speaker 1: All right. That's amazing. Rats they carry a disease called
13:54
Speaker 1: scistos somiasis. I probably mispronounced that, but that is something
13:58
Speaker 1: that can kill you with organ failure, can give you cancer.
14:02
Speaker 1: Rats also stole grain, and apparently they would drive these
14:05
Speaker 1: rats out of their holes, kill them, and allegedly get
14:09
Speaker 1: the grain out of their heidi holes. And feed that
14:12
Speaker 1: to livestock is supposedly what happened.
14:14
Speaker 2: That's vengeance right there. You actually take the grain that
14:17
Speaker 2: the rats stole back. Yeah, something else. So one point
14:21
Speaker 2: five billion rats were killed?
14:22
Speaker 1: How many pounds of brat is it? You got to
14:26
Speaker 1: reverse engineer it?
14:27
Speaker 2: So I would say about point seven a billion point
14:33
Speaker 2: seven billion pounds of rats.
14:34
Speaker 1: I'm going to go mean that I've seen New York rats.
14:37
Speaker 1: I don't know if Chinese rats hold a candle beds
14:39
Speaker 1: those New York rats. Those suckers can weigh several pounds.
14:41
Speaker 2: I feel like, oh several pounds. Yeah, yeah, so I
14:44
Speaker 2: stand by my estimate. Let's say point nine because not
14:48
Speaker 2: all of them are going to weigh two pounds.
14:49
Speaker 1: I love a rat, by the way.
14:51
Speaker 2: That's what I'm saying. I'm not fully on board. I
14:54
Speaker 2: get rats really easily spread a lot of disease in
14:57
Speaker 2: they had wow throughout human history. Rats themselves don't I
15:01
Speaker 2: don't think are problematic and like individually.
15:04
Speaker 1: Like the pet rat, Give me that little guy and
15:07
Speaker 1: let me scratch it under the chin.
15:08
Speaker 2: Super sweet. Yeah, so yeah, a lot of rats died. Again,
15:14
Speaker 2: the reason why they targeted rats is not just from
15:17
Speaker 2: spreading disease. But also they stole that grain too. They
15:20
Speaker 2: estimated that rats stole way more than sparrows, at about
15:24
Speaker 2: nine kilograms or twenty pounds per rat per year. So
15:28
Speaker 2: the writing was on the wall for rats.
15:30
Speaker 1: They were well, mosquitos, no one likes. They spread malaria,
15:35
Speaker 1: which is a bad problem. Obviously everyone knows that mosquitos,
15:40
Speaker 1: you know, hosts their larvae and wet things and puddles
15:43
Speaker 1: and spare tires and things like that still waters. So
15:47
Speaker 1: citizens where they were like, hey, dredge your rivers, fill
15:50
Speaker 1: your fill these watery ditches up with dirt, don't let
15:54
Speaker 1: water collect. Get rid of those feet breeding grounds. They also,
15:58
Speaker 1: and this is pretty remarkable, they fish and ducks to
16:01
Speaker 1: specifically feed on their larva, which is pretty impressive. And
16:06
Speaker 1: then you know, obviously swatting them is one way, but
16:09
Speaker 1: lots of awful, harmful insecticides just being sprayed everywhere.
16:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is our requisite reminiscence of the mosquito fogging
16:19
Speaker 2: truck driving down the street at night in your neighborhood
16:21
Speaker 2: in the summer. You remember that.
16:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, we didn't have those because we didn't live in neighborhoods,
16:25
Speaker 1: but I knew they existed.
16:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were something. Even back then in the seventies
16:30
Speaker 2: and eighties, it was like, well, you need to steer
16:32
Speaker 2: clear of those. They just looked ominous.
16:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. The very first opening shots of my beloved documentary Vernon,
16:40
Speaker 1: Florida is a mosquito truck going through the town.
16:42
Speaker 2: Oh boy. Yeah, so they killed as far as China
16:47
Speaker 2: estimates twenty four million pounds of mosquitoes or four point
16:51
Speaker 2: three five four trillion mosquitos over the course of this campaign.
16:56
Speaker 1: Hey, aside from the insecticide, I say hats off to
16:59
Speaker 1: that one.
17:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. Remember we talked about it before, if not in
17:02
Speaker 2: an episode, then on like Internet roundup, where there was
17:06
Speaker 2: a geneticist or a molecular biologist maybe who's like, hey,
17:10
Speaker 2: you know, I figured out a way so that we
17:11
Speaker 2: can get rid of mosquitos forever in just a few
17:14
Speaker 2: generations if we adjust this gene and release these genetically
17:18
Speaker 2: modified mosquitos into the wild, and like it would have worked.
17:22
Speaker 2: And everyone was like, you know, I don't know if
17:25
Speaker 2: we should do that. Mosquitos might be providing some service
17:27
Speaker 2: that we're just not aware of. It just seems wrong
17:31
Speaker 2: or dumb to just eradicate them all. And so we
17:33
Speaker 2: didn't pull the trigger on it, but some I think,
17:35
Speaker 2: like Yukon or something. Professor had figured out exactly how
17:38
Speaker 2: to do it.
17:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, but didn't they also come back and say like no,
17:44
Speaker 1: like we have yet to find any like if mosquitos
17:47
Speaker 1: were removed, there's no domino effect in the insect chain,
17:51
Speaker 1: like they could really go away and everyone would be fine.
17:54
Speaker 2: Yes, I do remember that too, And before you can
17:58
Speaker 2: say anything else, to say, we take a break.
18:00
Speaker 1: That sounds great, great.
18:02
Speaker 2: Thanks man, I appreciate the support.
18:40
Speaker 1: All right. So the fourth I know you were just
18:42
Speaker 1: waiting with baited breath about sparrows. They again weren't considered
18:47
Speaker 1: pest before the Great Leap Forward, which kind of preceded this.
18:51
Speaker 1: But he had a very mouth, had a very effective
18:53
Speaker 1: anti pest campaign going, so people bought into it, and
18:58
Speaker 1: they would kill them. They would crush their little eggs.
19:01
Speaker 1: They would like firecrackers and throw them at them. They
19:03
Speaker 1: would destroy their nests. They would scare set up, scarecrows
19:07
Speaker 1: or scare sparrows and fields and then shoot them dead.
19:13
Speaker 1: But apparently the most popular, far and away the most
19:15
Speaker 1: popular method is that they would just make such a
19:18
Speaker 1: racket in the streets banging pots and pans and yelling
19:21
Speaker 1: and screaming that the sparrows would fly until they tired
19:25
Speaker 1: and then would just drop down from the sky.
19:27
Speaker 2: Right but not dead. The people have to kill for them,
19:30
Speaker 2: would go kill them by hand, usually squire storm or
19:33
Speaker 2: break their necks or something like that. And guys, if
19:36
Speaker 2: you are not familiar with sparrows, and you are not
19:39
Speaker 2: driving right now, go look up sparrows. They're the little
19:42
Speaker 2: cute brown birds that hop around outside on the cafe patio,
19:48
Speaker 2: not bothering anybody, just being cute. These are the birds
19:52
Speaker 2: that the people of China were killing by hand in
19:55
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one.
19:58
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, of finchy looking just they're very very cute.
20:03
Speaker 1: Oh wow, for cute. I'm actually seeing a one of
20:05
Speaker 1: those propaganda posters right now that has a rat, a sparrow,
20:11
Speaker 1: a mosquito, and a fly impaled on a Chinese sword.
20:15
Speaker 2: Yes, that works. That makes me want to kill a sparrow.
20:18
Speaker 1: It's kind of a really sweet poster actually, but I
20:21
Speaker 1: just don't like the message.
20:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, So as you can bet like this
20:26
Speaker 2: led to the near extinction of sparrows in just a
20:30
Speaker 2: few years.
20:32
Speaker 1: So here's the problem is with the sparrows. Sparrows eat locusts,
20:38
Speaker 1: and locusts are a true pest. So without the sparrows,
20:41
Speaker 1: the locusts really really thrived. It turns out that sparrows
20:46
Speaker 1: are a very crucial part of maintaining that ecosystem, and
20:50
Speaker 1: without them there were no natural predators for the locusts,
20:54
Speaker 1: and they ballooned and the crops were devastated. I think
20:57
Speaker 1: the World Atlas estimated that the locusts were ponssible for
21:00
Speaker 1: destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of grain because of.
21:04
Speaker 2: This, right, So that was I mean, that equals a
21:08
Speaker 2: lot of crop yield, even in China with all of
21:11
Speaker 2: the arable land that they have. And so if you're
21:14
Speaker 2: familiar with Chinese history, especially in the late fifties to
21:18
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties, you know what's coming. The Great Famine of China.
21:24
Speaker 2: It lasted from nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one,
21:27
Speaker 2: and it is far and away the most devastating famine
21:30
Speaker 2: in the history of humanity as far as recorded history goes. Yeah,
21:36
Speaker 2: estimates run from fifteen million to up to seventy eight million,
21:40
Speaker 2: and I saw reasonable people estimating it was actually between
21:44
Speaker 2: twenty and fifty million people who starved to death from
21:49
Speaker 2: just nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty one in China.
21:52
Speaker 2: That's how bad the famine was. And some people tie
21:55
Speaker 2: that back to at least in part, the four Pest
21:59
Speaker 2: campaign and the effect of removing sparrows from the ecosystem.
22:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I mean there was many reports and
22:07
Speaker 1: instances of suicide, apparently cannibalism, people murdering each other to
22:13
Speaker 1: get to their food. It got really really bad. There
22:16
Speaker 1: was also it was also while it was happening, Mal
22:20
Speaker 1: refused to acknowledge that it was happening, like there is
22:22
Speaker 1: no famine. It was after everyone died, like a year
22:26
Speaker 1: later that Mal finally admitted that a famine had occurred,
22:29
Speaker 1: which is like everyone knows there's a famine going on.
22:31
Speaker 1: So that's like the ultimate sort of gas lighting when
22:34
Speaker 1: your leaders not even acknowledging that. But he didn't accept,
22:37
Speaker 1: you know, he blamed it on rightists and their failure
22:41
Speaker 1: to implement his policies correctly.
22:43
Speaker 2: From what I could tell, I did not see how
22:45
Speaker 2: much he actually was aware. Part of the issue was
22:50
Speaker 2: how just ensconced and insulated he was from bad news
22:54
Speaker 2: because all of the people under him, and all the
22:56
Speaker 2: people under those people were afraid of being beaten in
23:00
Speaker 2: and murdered for giving Maw bad news essentially, so he
23:05
Speaker 2: might have really not realized just how bad things will be.
23:09
Speaker 1: I bet you can't lose fifty million people though, and
23:12
Speaker 1: not just notice like traffic's better.
23:14
Speaker 2: Well, the that's the other thing too. Most of the
23:17
Speaker 2: deaths were in the rural areas. They were not in
23:20
Speaker 2: the cities. A lot of people in the cities were
23:22
Speaker 2: probably hard up, but they were not starving to death.
23:25
Speaker 2: It was the people in the countryside. And a lot
23:27
Speaker 2: of that had to do with terrible, terrible policies that
23:30
Speaker 2: were on top of a bunch of other issues that
23:33
Speaker 2: all kind of came together to exacerbate this famine and
23:36
Speaker 2: make it as bad as it was.
23:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, well we're going to talk about those because you know,
23:41
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone maintains that it was just the
23:44
Speaker 1: sparrows that caused this famine, right or you know, and
23:48
Speaker 1: people to die at the rates of tens of millions.
23:51
Speaker 1: But there there were a few factors. One was obviously
23:54
Speaker 1: environmental factors. In nineteen fifty nine, there was a drought
23:58
Speaker 1: in northern China, and rain and flooding in southern and
24:02
Speaker 1: eastern China, and all of these natural disasters were kind
24:06
Speaker 1: of happening at the same time, which are going to
24:08
Speaker 1: affect the grain output. Led to a lot of grain deficit.
24:11
Speaker 1: I think in nineteen fifty nine, fifty five percent, like
24:15
Speaker 1: more than half of their farmland was unusable, and in
24:19
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty their wheat harvest was down seventy percent.
24:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's a staple crop. I mean, that's the
24:24
Speaker 2: kind of crop that you keep your people alive with,
24:27
Speaker 2: is wheat, Right, So that was a big deal. There's
24:30
Speaker 2: another one that may or may not have been true,
24:32
Speaker 2: but I know that Mao blamed the Soviet Union on
24:38
Speaker 2: the famine or making it as bad as it was,
24:40
Speaker 2: and that supposedly the Soviet Union called in their debts
24:44
Speaker 2: during this famine that the relations between Communist China and
24:49
Speaker 2: Communist USSR had deteriorated right around this time, and so
24:54
Speaker 2: just basically to well it be jerks, the USSR said, hey,
24:59
Speaker 2: you know that money you owes, we need it right now.
25:01
Speaker 2: I saw that that's not necessarily the case. And someone
25:04
Speaker 2: said that the Soviet Union may have even offered for
25:07
Speaker 2: them to stop making payments for the Chinese to stop
25:10
Speaker 2: making payments to the USSR for three years during this famine.
25:13
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's true or not, but that
25:16
Speaker 2: is a long standing talking point that came out of China.
25:19
Speaker 2: At the end of the famine, when mal finally did
25:22
Speaker 2: admit that it had happened, he blamed it in part on.
25:24
Speaker 1: The USSR, Yeah, for sure. Another part was what we
25:28
Speaker 1: kind of mentioned earlier with the Great Leap Forward, was
25:30
Speaker 1: that push for industrialization, and not just a push, but
25:35
Speaker 1: it's such a rapid pace that they completely upended kind
25:40
Speaker 1: of the way things had been such that it was devastating.
25:43
Speaker 1: They you know, if all of a sudden everyone is
25:45
Speaker 1: led away from farming and producing steel in their backyard,
25:49
Speaker 1: you're just going to have less grain planned to begin with.
25:52
Speaker 1: And the other sort of irony to this is this
25:55
Speaker 1: wasn't even good steel. That they were getting people making
25:57
Speaker 1: steel in their backyards out of flatwear and pots and
26:02
Speaker 1: pans just gets you pig iron. It didn't result in
26:04
Speaker 1: anything that they could use for like big time construction.
26:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a huge one. I mean they were
26:10
Speaker 2: also not trained, right, They just basically said, hey, create
26:14
Speaker 2: a backyard smelting furnace, and here's your quota for steel
26:17
Speaker 2: every month or quarter a year, go figure it out. Essentially,
26:22
Speaker 2: So not only were they paying less attention to farming,
26:25
Speaker 2: they were also spending more time trying to figure this out.
26:29
Speaker 2: And then, like you said, we're unsuccessful. That was, from
26:32
Speaker 2: what I saw, one of the biggest exacerbators of this
26:36
Speaker 2: whole problem, because it reduced the crop output so drastically
26:43
Speaker 2: that there was just not enough food to go around,
26:46
Speaker 2: not even close to it, because people simply stopped farming
26:50
Speaker 2: as much.
26:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, and at the same time, they had quotas on
26:53
Speaker 1: that grain. So even though they were saying, hey, go
26:58
Speaker 1: quit growing things, make steel in the backyard, but also
27:01
Speaker 1: we're going to raise the quotas on grain at the
27:02
Speaker 1: same time to unprecedented levels basically, and of course they're
27:07
Speaker 1: not going to meet those quotas. So party members were
27:09
Speaker 1: afraid of being blamed kind of like what you were
27:11
Speaker 1: talking about, and covering up this deficit. And if you
27:14
Speaker 1: did try to report, you know, accurate numbers, you might
27:17
Speaker 1: be beaten and detained or tortured. And so they thought
27:21
Speaker 1: they had a grain surplus, so they end up exporting
27:25
Speaker 1: grain when they were short on grain to feed their
27:27
Speaker 1: own people because they thought they had a surplus.
27:29
Speaker 2: Yes, and not only would they export it. The grain
27:32
Speaker 2: surplus was considered what the cities needed to survive, or
27:38
Speaker 2: however much they needed to eat. They didn't calculate grain
27:41
Speaker 2: surpluses based on what percentage of how much was grown.
27:45
Speaker 2: It was the city's need this much. It doesn't matter
27:48
Speaker 2: how much that leaves you peasant, because we're feeding the cities.
27:51
Speaker 2: That's what we're interested in doing. And so that's why
27:53
Speaker 2: I was saying most of the starvation happened in the countryside,
27:57
Speaker 2: whereas the cities managed to survive, and I think that
28:01
Speaker 2: that probably gave an impression that there wasn't actually a
28:04
Speaker 2: famine going on. You had to go out into the
28:06
Speaker 2: rural areas for that to happen. And then dissenters, people
28:09
Speaker 2: who might speak up or criticize or whatever, were actually
28:14
Speaker 2: tortured to death, beaten to death, murdered by the state.
28:18
Speaker 2: And I think that someone estimated that there was between
28:20
Speaker 2: six to eight percent of the deaths of the potentially
28:23
Speaker 2: fifty million deaths during the entire Great Leap Forward were
28:29
Speaker 2: caused by torture, and those were mostly peasants.
28:33
Speaker 1: Six to eight percent. That's amazing.
28:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, being tortured to death for basically speaking up about
28:40
Speaker 2: being left distarved to death essentially.
28:43
Speaker 1: All right, I say we take another break and we
28:45
Speaker 1: come back and talk about the legacy of this and
28:47
Speaker 1: whether or not those sparrows made it come back in
28:49
Speaker 1: China right after.
28:50
Speaker 2: This, okay, Chuck. So finally, finally, after a relatively short time,
29:31
Speaker 2: China realized like, we should probably leave the sparrows alone again.
29:35
Speaker 2: This was right before they became extinct in China, and
29:39
Speaker 2: it was as recent or as soon as nineteen sixty.
29:42
Speaker 2: I think the whole campaign started in nineteen fifty eight, right,
29:45
Speaker 2: so just two to three years they were like, oh god,
29:49
Speaker 2: this is not going well. So they took the sparrows
29:52
Speaker 2: off and they said, bedbugs, you're up. And the bedbugs said, gulp.
29:56
Speaker 1: Can I kill a bedbug with your permission?
29:59
Speaker 2: Yeah? I've gotten a problem with killing bed bugs. I
30:02
Speaker 2: don't know much about them. I just know that they're
30:04
Speaker 2: very much disliked and they're hard to get rid of,
30:06
Speaker 2: so why not?
30:07
Speaker 1: Okay? Yeah, they swapped out sparrows for bed bugs. Eventually
30:13
Speaker 1: they would add cockroaches to that list. Much to your chagrin,
30:18
Speaker 1: but they did study sort of the initial years of
30:21
Speaker 1: the four pest campaign. They did study what was going
30:23
Speaker 1: on with the sparrows and you know, whether or not
30:25
Speaker 1: it was making a difference, and they're eating habits and
30:27
Speaker 1: things like that. And in nineteen sixty, I guess, I
30:31
Speaker 1: don't know if this is right before or right after
30:33
Speaker 1: it ended, but they reported like, hey, we were sort
30:37
Speaker 1: of mistaken in our initial estimates. It turns out they
30:41
Speaker 1: aren't eating as much grain as we thought. They actually
30:44
Speaker 1: eat insects, Like seventy five percent of their diet consists
30:47
Speaker 1: of insects and about twenty five percent is grain. And
30:52
Speaker 1: this one researcher collected along with his colleagues, collected a
30:57
Speaker 1: bunch of sparrows to study and found that, hey, they
31:01
Speaker 1: they're seasonal grain eaters. On top of that, so during
31:04
Speaker 1: the winter is the only time they're feeding on these
31:06
Speaker 1: grain seeds. Otherwise they're generally eating pests that keep us,
31:11
Speaker 1: you know, keep our harvest more safe.
31:13
Speaker 2: Right exactly. I think that that was the the research
31:17
Speaker 2: by zeng Zujin, pretty sure, it's as close as I
31:22
Speaker 2: can get. His research was what led to the sparrows
31:25
Speaker 2: being taken off of the Four Pest campaign.
31:27
Speaker 1: That's right.
31:28
Speaker 2: So China realized the error of their ways and they
31:31
Speaker 2: took sparrows off. But not only did they do that,
31:33
Speaker 2: they started reintroducing them by importing them from the Soviet
31:37
Speaker 2: Union to try to bring the sparrow population back, and slowly,
31:42
Speaker 2: over the years it did bounce back. They're no longer extinct,
31:46
Speaker 2: and there's hundreds of millions of them in China today,
31:49
Speaker 2: but that's still far less than there was before the
31:52
Speaker 2: Four Pest campaign. Part of the way that they have
31:55
Speaker 2: been able to come back is China outlawed talk about
31:59
Speaker 2: like just getting mixed messages here, kind of outlawed killing
32:03
Speaker 2: sparrows after they took them off the four Pest list
32:07
Speaker 2: and had said, go kill hundreds of millions of sparrows.
32:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, driving from the sky with pots and pans, break
32:15
Speaker 1: their cute little necks. And then a year later, actually,
32:18
Speaker 1: you're going to go to jail if you killed more
32:20
Speaker 1: than twenty of them. It's a criminal offense.
32:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, isn't that crazy? That's life under an authoritarian government Tata.
32:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. They've there's been, you know, different sort
32:31
Speaker 1: of versions of the Four Pest campaign over the years.
32:34
Speaker 1: That's continued. I know we mentioned the bed bugs. I
32:37
Speaker 1: think that was in the nineteen sixties. In nineteen starting
32:42
Speaker 1: in the eighties, rats came back on the scene as
32:45
Speaker 1: far as you know, a big pest to eradicate. And
32:49
Speaker 1: then in nineteen ninety eight there was a full sort
32:52
Speaker 1: of reboot. Let's go back to the four pest campaign,
32:55
Speaker 1: remember that that TV show we all love back then,
32:58
Speaker 1: let's reboot it and new propaganda posters in nineteen ninety eight,
33:02
Speaker 1: like kind of like the old style instill. But this
33:05
Speaker 1: is when they added the cockroaches, so it was flies, mosquitos, rats,
33:10
Speaker 1: and cocker roaches.
33:11
Speaker 2: And that nineteen eighties rat eradication campaign was very successful.
33:16
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty four alone, trying to kill an estimated
33:19
Speaker 2: five percent of the entire global rat population. They killed
33:23
Speaker 2: so many rats one year.
33:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they were paying citizens in as late
33:29
Speaker 1: as two thousand and seven to kill individual flies in
33:32
Speaker 1: certain places.
33:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think in twenty twenty four they started
33:35
Speaker 2: another mosquito campaign, anti mosquito campaign to try to create
33:40
Speaker 2: the mosquito free village. So not bad, I mean, considering
33:45
Speaker 2: that they got rid of malaria back in what year.
33:48
Speaker 1: Was that I think they I think they finally wasn't
33:51
Speaker 1: it like twenty twenty one, they finally said they were
33:53
Speaker 1: malaria free.
33:54
Speaker 2: Yes, so it did have some positive effects at least
33:58
Speaker 2: as far as the stupid mosquito go. But the Great Famine,
34:02
Speaker 2: which you just can't talk about the four Pest campaign
34:05
Speaker 2: without talking about the Great Famine because they were tied
34:08
Speaker 2: together in some ways. For sure. They did a study,
34:13
Speaker 2: I think two different studies in twenty twenty three on
34:16
Speaker 2: the effects the Great Famine had on people who survived it,
34:19
Speaker 2: and they found that there are definite differences between people
34:22
Speaker 2: who lived through the Great Famine and people who didn't.
34:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe that was a higher rate of non
34:29
Speaker 1: communicable diseases We're talking diabetes, cancer, psychiatric problems even yea
34:35
Speaker 1: than the general population, and may have also caused a
34:38
Speaker 1: decline in the male birth rate all the way through
34:41
Speaker 1: the early nineteen sixties.
34:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is really ironic considering the one child policy,
34:46
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah for sure, Yeah, which I guess either
34:50
Speaker 2: as ironic because of the one child policy or led
34:52
Speaker 2: to the one child policy. Yeah, you got anything else?
34:57
Speaker 1: I got nothing else? Four Pests is over.
34:59
Speaker 2: Yeah. I had tip to Emily for coming up with
35:01
Speaker 2: that and one little line yap is obnoxious, people call it.
35:06
Speaker 2: If you want to know what they call sparrows in China,
35:08
Speaker 2: they call them macha.
35:10
Speaker 1: I've never heard of lon yap.
35:12
Speaker 2: Sure you have. I've made that joke before and you
35:14
Speaker 2: thought it was hilarious. Really yeah, it's like an extra
35:18
Speaker 2: little something, like an extra little treat. I heard it
35:22
Speaker 2: on like the Splendid Table once they used it seriously
35:26
Speaker 2: where they were talking about how the bottom of an
35:28
Speaker 2: ice cream cone is filled with a little bit of
35:30
Speaker 2: chocolate to keep the ice cream from melting out the bottom.
35:34
Speaker 2: They called it a little line yap.
35:36
Speaker 1: Huh.
35:37
Speaker 2: That formed my impression of the word land yap from
35:39
Speaker 2: that point forward.
35:41
Speaker 1: So in that case, the cherry on top is the
35:42
Speaker 1: chocolate on the bottom.
35:44
Speaker 2: Chuck Wow, Wow, Well, I think obviously Chuck has brought
35:50
Speaker 2: about listener mail.
35:54
Speaker 1: This is joke or not, Josh, so you get to
35:58
Speaker 1: answer this question. Had a few people right in, so
36:00
Speaker 1: I think there was either some confusion of a joke
36:03
Speaker 1: or maybe you just got something wrong. We'll see. Hey, guys,
36:06
Speaker 1: the reason I'm writing is because I heard something in
36:08
Speaker 1: the first Heavy Metal episode that I thought was a joke.
36:11
Speaker 1: But after listening to the audio again and checking the
36:12
Speaker 1: transcript even I'm wondering if it's just an error. And
36:15
Speaker 1: it got through mainly because it was so deadpan. But seabuddy, Brian,
36:20
Speaker 1: you can never tell with Josh because he can be
36:22
Speaker 1: so deadpan. I've shown over and over and over that
36:25
Speaker 1: I can't tell sometimes if he's joking. Here we go.
36:30
Speaker 1: Josh explained that Black Sabbath got their name from the
36:32
Speaker 1: Boris Karloff movie Black Sabbath, which is true, but the
36:34
Speaker 1: film isn't about a talking boat winning a regatta for
36:38
Speaker 1: a group of orphans. In the film, Karloff hosts three
36:40
Speaker 1: different horror stories, but none are about a regatta or orphans.
36:43
Speaker 1: Boris Karloff as an animated talking boat that saved orphans
36:47
Speaker 1: would be amazing at any rate. Maybe I'm wrong and
36:49
Speaker 1: Josh was joking and Chuck just missed it, or it
36:51
Speaker 1: was explained to such and I miss it, but I
36:53
Speaker 1: wanted to pass it along.
36:54
Speaker 2: Rock On.
36:55
Speaker 1: That is from Brian and Brookline, New Hampshire.
36:59
Speaker 2: Nice Brian, Rian, Brian, Thanks Brian, So what is it?
37:04
Speaker 1: Uh?
37:04
Speaker 2: Let me just walk us through a couple of points
37:06
Speaker 2: real quick, and I think it'll become.
37:07
Speaker 1: Clear, okay.
37:08
Speaker 2: One is that Black Sabbath the band would name themselves
37:13
Speaker 2: after a movie about a talking boat at windsor Regotta
37:16
Speaker 2: for a group of orphans.
37:17
Speaker 1: Seems like a joke.
37:18
Speaker 2: And secondly that a movie about a talking boat that
37:22
Speaker 2: windsor Regatta for a group of orphans is called Black Sabbath.
37:26
Speaker 2: It seems like totally.
37:28
Speaker 1: Made okay, So is there a talking boat orphan movie
37:32
Speaker 1: and you were just referencing that as a joke or
37:34
Speaker 1: did you just completely whole cloth create that.
37:36
Speaker 2: I made that up from whole cloth? I don't. I
37:38
Speaker 2: don't think there's a movie like that. I could believe it,
37:40
Speaker 2: but I've never heard of one.
37:42
Speaker 1: Well, then, in that case, my friend, I give you
37:44
Speaker 1: the improv a word for the month because that you
37:47
Speaker 1: sold it and it was pretty great.
37:49
Speaker 2: Thank you. I appreciate that. That means the world to me.
37:52
Speaker 1: I couldn't have made up such an outlandish movie plot
37:57
Speaker 1: on the on the off the dome like that.
37:59
Speaker 2: Nice. Thank you, and thank you to Brian for bringing
38:02
Speaker 2: that to Chuck's attention. I've been waiting a little while
38:05
Speaker 2: and I'm glad we got a chance to go over it.
38:07
Speaker 1: It's very satisfying.
38:09
Speaker 2: It was very satisfying. If you want to be like
38:11
Speaker 2: Brian and set us up for a satisfying conversation, we
38:14
Speaker 2: love that kind of stuff. You can send us an
38:17
Speaker 2: email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
38:23
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
38:26
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