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