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

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

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

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. It's just us, and that's okay, because we are going to do our best today, pronouncing Chinese words, which is always a laugh riot if you're a fan of the podcast. 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's 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. No, but I do have to say. say you you judge me pretty hard on the cockroach and while just very casually talking about how much you would kill a mosquito and ticks and flees but 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 yeah god's gift to insects yeah my boundaries apply to all

Okay, moving forward. We're not talking about cockroaches yet. We're talking about rats, mosquitoes, flies. I have an issue with rats, but I get where they're coming from. And sparrows. These were the four pests that made up the four pests campaign carried out at the end of the 50s, beginning of the 1960s, in communist China, which newspapers at the time called Red China. And it was an enormously set.

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 had, was not the first time something like this had been tried, and it's been tried since then over there as well. In the 1920s and 30s in China, they had fly-killing campaigns. In mid-1920s, it 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 were incentivized, like, middle schoolers to go out and kill flies and bring them in and show them to their teachers and like a little matchbox, let's say. and things like that. But apparently that resulted in more than 10 million dead flies. So there was precedent in China for doing stuff like this. Yeah, so much so that I actually saw

a contemporaneous newspaper account that was talking about the Four Pest's 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,

John 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. And that was a very ambitious campaign in 1958, January, 1958, that had a lot of initiatives,

but the real goal, the kind of stated goal, was to industrialize and to overtake the UK's industrial output in less than 15 years, mainly in, there 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.

You 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. It was, they tried new, weird sort of farming techniques that weren't tested. It was a pretty enthusiastic campaign, you know,

from the people as far as how they received it and how they got into it. apparently that the farmers sometimes or people would just work late into the night and they called it catching the moon and stars and public officials were they would issue these steel and grain quotas to like you know make as much steel and grow as much grain as you could but they were very unrealistic quotas they were not able to fulfill those and in that time with you know this sort of idealistic authoritative approach to government they were overreporting output And as we'll see, that kind of happened again with the four-pest campaign. Yeah, that was an enormous problem that China ran into in almost immediately after they began the four-pest campaign. And even though they were kind of parallel to one another, they were definitely intertwined at least to some degree, right?

Yeah. So the four-pest campaign itself, you might say like, okay, China's trying to industrialize and catch up to the UK. who cares about flies and sparrows? And it turns out that Mao cared a lot about flies and sparrows and other pests. He, and I've noticed this before, and a lot of the stuff he talked about, he almost had like a contempt for nature and a real, like, inner desire to dominate nature and bend it to human will, to his will, at least.

He had a slogan called Man Must Conquer Nature. That's pretty on the nose, right? Yeah. And also, apparently, he was quoted back in 1958 that he wanted to make the high mountain bow its head, make the river yield the way. And so this really kind of tied these eradication campaigns and make no mistake, the point was to get rid of every fly, every 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 inhibition to be, to get rid of disease, to stop these contagions from spreading because they were coming out of a decade in the 1940s where they had smallpox and cholera and malaria. And the infant mortality rate was like 30%. So there was definitely, you know, they reacted with these big, large-scale vaccination, drives, sanitation initiatives, but getting rid of these pests, they thought could get rid of the things that were causing these diseases to begin with. 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. So that was why sparrows

were on there. You might have been sitting here the whole time going, what are you talking about was sparrows. They're the cutest little bird. They're the greatest of all birds, potentially. Why would you want to kill sparrows? And sparrows just got wrapped up into this big drag night, 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 encourage kids, of course, to do this. But just individually, they were encouraging people like, hey, kill every mosquito you can find. Kill every fly that comes near you. It's your patriotic duty to do so.

They would incentivize and reward people sometimes. But usually it was just like this is something you need to get on board with to make us all healthier. 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 an staggering infant mortality rate that they were dealing with. And it kind of drives home like, okay, this was even more ambitious than it seems on its face

because not only are they trying to leap forward, they're really having to come from a deficit to even begin to leap. 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 would 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 farms that are flourishing and industry that is doing great. And all you have to do, is kill these pests. It even filtered down to the level of children where they had like children's songs and kids' books talking about killing sparrows. Yeah, they did absolutely everything right 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 up to 1958-59 viewed sparrows pretty normally. And then all of a sudden, the whole country was like, yes, well, we'll kill sparrows, no problem because that propaganda campaign was so effective. Yeah, they had a, they filled out the questionnaire.

How do you view sparrows? A, favorably, B, not favorably. C, don't really have an opinion. Right, 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. Oh, 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 diseases that they spread is cholera, which is not fun and it spreads very easily. So flies were targeted in 220 million pounds of flies were killed. Okay, hold on. I have a question. I 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. You ready?

Yeah, yeah. First of all, I have to shout out Bing and it's 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. Oh, gosh.

Thanks for the help. Bing. So I had to sludge forward and do it myself. So I looked up how much a house flyways. I saw 50 milligrams. I saw 10 milligrams. Okay? So if you divide that per pound, that equals 9,000 flies per pound. Okay? It also equals more. I'll get to that in a second. But that, so 90 milligrams of fly, which is way high, that's 9,000 flies per pound times 220 million pounds of flies equals 1.98, real. 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. That'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, yeah, I didn't go ahead and convert it into Big Macs, which I feel a little bit about, but, you know, I still feel like I did a good job. All right, that's amazing. Rats, they carry a disease called schistosomyasis. I'd probably mispronounce that, but that is something that can kill you with organ failure,

can give you cancer. Rats also stole grain, and apparently they would drive these rats out of their holes, kill them, and allegedly get the grain out of their hidey holes and feed that to livestock is supposedly what happened. That's vengeance right there. You actually take the grain that the rat 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, 0.7.4.7. 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 are 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 2 pounds. I love a rat, by the way. That's what I'm saying. I'm not fully on board. I get rats really easily spread a lot of disease and they have throughout human history. But rats themselves, I don't I don't think are problematic and, like, 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 nine kilograms or 20 pounds per rat per year. So the writing was on the wall for rats. they work. Well, mosquitoes, no one likes. They spread malaria, which is a bad problem, obviously. Everyone knows that mosquitoes, you know, hosts their larvae and wet things and puddles

and spare tires and things like that. Still waters. So citizens were, they were like, hey, dread 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.

Yeah, 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, where 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. hey 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 do that. Mosquitoes might be providing some service that we're just not aware of. It just seems wrong or dumb to just eradicate them all. And so we didn't pull the trigger on it. But some, I think like Yukon or something, Professor had figured out exactly how to do it. 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. The Super Secret Festi Club podcast season four is here. And we're locked in. That means more See Cheesme? Terrible love advice. Evil spells to cast on your ex. No, no, no, no. We're not doing that this season.

Oh. Well, this season, we're leveling up. Each episode will feature a special bestie, and you're not going to want to miss it. Get in here. Today we have a very special guest with us. Our new super secret bestie is the diva of the people. The diva of the people. I'm just like text your ex.

My theory is that if you need to figure out that the stove is hot, go and touch it. Go and figure it out for yourself. Okay. That's us. That's us. My name is Curley. And I'm Maya. In each episode, we'll talk about love, friendship, heartbreaks, men, and, of course, our favorite secrets. Listen to the Super Secret Bestie Club as a part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

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we're breaking down the interesting ways psychology applies to real life, like how our pets actually change our brain chemistry, the psychology of office politics, whether happiness is even a real emotion, and my favorite episode, why do we all secretly crave external validation? It's so interesting to me that we are so quick to believe others' judgments of us and not our own. I found a study that said, not being liked actually creates similar levels of pain as physical pain. Like, no wonder we care so much. So the secret is, if you want to be okay with not being liked, you have to know why your brain craves it in the first place. Learn more about the psychology of external validation,

everyday life, and of course your 20s this September. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so the fourth, I know you were just waiting with bated breath about sparrows. They, again, weren't considered pests before the Great Leap Forward, which kind of preceded this. But he had a very, Mao had a very effective anti-pest campaign going, so people bought into it. And they would kill them. They would crush their little eggs. They would light firecrackers and throw them at them.

They would destroy their nests. They would set up scarecrows or scare sparrows and fields and then shoot them dead. But apparently the most popular, far in a way, 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. Right, but not dead. The people after them would go kill them. kill them by hand usually, squish them or break their necks or something like that. And guys, if you're not familiar with sparrows and you are not driving right now, go look up sparrows.

They're the 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. And 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. Yes, 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 locust, and locust are a true pest. So without the sparrows, the locust 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 locust, and they ballooned. And the crops were devastated. I think the World Atlas estimated that the,

The locusts were responsible for destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of grain because of this. Right. So that was, I mean, that equals a lot of crop yield, even in China with all of the arable land that they have. And so if you're familiar with Chinese history, especially in the late 50s to 1960s, you know what's coming. The great famine of China, it lasted from 1958 to 1961, and it is far and away the most, devastating famine in the history of humanity, as far as recorded history goes. Yeah. Estimates run from 15 million to up to 78 million.

And I saw a reasonable people estimating it was actually between 20 and 50 million people who starved to death from just 1958 to 1961 in China. That's how bad the famine was. And some people tie that back to, at least in part, the four pest camps. 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's not even acknowledging that. Right. 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. 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. Most of the deaths were in the rural areas. They were not in the cities. A lot of people in the cities were probably hard up, but they were not starving to death. It was the people in the countryside, and a lot of that had to do with terrible, terrible policies that were on top of a bunch of other issues that all kind of came together to exacerbate this 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. But there were a few factors. One was obviously environmental factors. In 1959, there was a drought in northern China and rain and flooding in southern and eastern China. And all of these natural disasters were kind of happening at the same time, which are going to affect the grain output, led to a lot of grain deficit.

I think in 1959, 55 percent, like more than half of their farmland was unusable. And in 1960, their wheat harvest was down 70 percent. Yeah, and that's a staple crop. I mean, that's the kind of crop that you keep your people alive with is wheat, right? So that was a big deal. There's another one that may or may not have been true, but I know that Mao blamed the Soviet Union on the famine or making it as bad as it was, and that supposedly the Soviet Union called in their debts during this famine, that the relations between communist China and communist USSR had deteriorated right or around this time. And so just basically to, well, to be jerks, the USSR said, hey, you know all that money you owe us? We need it right now. I saw that that's not necessarily the case. And someone said that the Soviet Union may have even offered for them to stop making payments, for the Chinese to stop making payments to the USSR for three years during this famine. I don't know if that's

true or not, but that is a longstanding talking point that came out of China at the end of the famine when Mao finally did admit that it had happened. He blamed it in part in part in part in part of the USSR. Yeah, for sure. Another part was what we kind of mentioned earlier with the Great Leap Forward was that push for industrialization and not just a push, but it's such a rapid pace that they completely upended kind of the way things had been such that it was devastating. They, you know, if all of a sudden everyone is led away from farming and producing steel in their backyard, you're just going to have less grain planted to begin with. And the other sort of irony to this is this wasn't even good steel that they were getting. People making steel in their backyards

out of flatware and pots and pans just gets you pig iron. It didn't result in anything that they could use for like big time construction. Yeah, that was a huge one. I mean, they were also not trained, right? They were, they just basically said, hey, create a backyard smelting furnace. And here's your quota for steel every month or quarter or year. Go figure it out, essentially. So not only were they paying less attention to farming, they were also spending more time trying to figure this out, and then, like you said, we're unsuccessful. That was from what I saw, one of the biggest exacerbators of this whole problem, because it reduced the crop output so drastically that there was just not enough food to go around, not even close to it, because people simply stopped farming as much.

Yeah, and at the same time, they had quotas on that grain. So even though they were saying, hey, go quit growing things, make steel in their backyard, but also we're going to raise the quotas on grain at the same time to unprecedented levels, basically. And of course, they're not going to meet those quotas. So party members were afraid of being blamed, kind of like what you were talking about, and covering up this deficit. and if you did try to report, you know, accurate numbers, you might be beaten and detained or

tortured. And so they thought they had a grain surplus, so they end up exporting grain when they were short on grain to feed their own people because they thought they had a surplus. Yes. And not only would they export it, the grain surplus was considered what the cities needed to survive or however much they needed to eat. They didn't calculate grain surpluses based on what percentage of how much was grown. It was the cities need this much. It doesn't matter how much that leaves you peasant because we're feeding the cities. That's what we're interested in doing. And so that's why I was saying most of the starvation happened in the countryside, whereas the cities managed to survive. And I think that that probably gave an

impression that there wasn't actually a famine going on. You had to go out into the rural areas for that to happen. And then dissenters, people who might speak up or criticize. size or whatever, were actually tortured to death, beaten to death, murdered by the state. And I think someone estimated that there was between 6 to 8% of the deaths, of the potentially 50 million deaths during the entire Great Leap Forward were caused by torture, and those were mostly peasants. 6 to 8%. That's amazing.

Yeah, being tortured to death for basically speaking up about being left to starved. death, essentially. All right. I say we take another break and we come back and talk about the legacy of this and whether or not those sparrows

made a come back in China right after this. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grazacus come again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music

and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talked all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of Chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash, because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Super Secret Bestie Club podcast season four is here. And we're locked in.

That means more juicy cheesement. Terrible love advice. Evil spells to cast on your ex. No, no, no, no. We're not doing that this season. Oh. Well, this season, we're leveling up. Each episode will feature a special bestie, and you're not going to want to miss it.

Get in here. Today we have a very special guest with us. Our new Super Secret Bestie is The Deva of the People. The Deva of the People. I'm just like text your ex. My theory is that if you need to figure out that the stove is hot, go and touch it. Go and figure it out for yourself.

Okay. That's us. That's us. My name is Curley. And I'm Maya. In each episode, we'll talk about love, friendship, heart breaks, men, and of course, our favorite secrets. Listen to the Super Secret Bestie Club as a part of the Michael Thura podcast network

available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you guys. your podcast. Hi, it's Jemisbeg, host of the psychology of your 20s. Remember when you used to have Science Week at school? Well, if you loved that, how would you feel about a full psychology month? This September, the psychology of your 20s, we're breaking down the interesting ways psychology applies to real life, like how our pets actually change our brain chemistry, the psychology of office politics, whether happiness is even a real emotion, And my favorite episode, why do we all secretly crave external validation?

It's so interesting to me that we are so quick to believe others' judgments of us and not our own. I found a study that said, not being liked actually creates similar levels of pain as physical pain. Like, no wonder we care so much. So the secret is, if you want to be okay with not being liked, you have to know why your brain craves it in the first place. Learn more about the psychology of external validation, everyday life. And of course, your 20s, this September. Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get, your podcasts.

Okay, Chuck, so finally, finally, after a relatively short time, China realized, like, we should probably leave the sparrows alone. Again, this was right before they became extinct in China, and it was as recent, or as soon as 1960. I think the whole campaign started in 1958, right? So just two to three years, they were like, oh, God, this is not going well. So they took the sparrows off, and they said, bedbubes. You're up, and the bedbugs said gulp. Can I kill a bed bug with your permission? Yeah.

I've got no problem with killing bedbugs. I don't know much about them. I just know that they're very much disliked and they're hard to get rid of. So why not? Okay. Yeah, they swapped out sparrows for bedbugs. Eventually they would add cockroaches to that list, much to your chagrin. But they did study sort of the initial years of the four-pest campaign.

They did study what was going on with the sparrows and whether or not it was making a difference and they're eating habits and things like that. And in 1960, I guess, I don't know if this was right before or right after it ended, but they reported like, hey, we were sort of mistaken in our initial estimates. It turns out they aren't eating as much grain as we thought. They actually eat insects, like 75% of their diet consist of insects, and about 25% is grain. and this one researcher collected, along with his colleagues, collected a bunch of sparrows to study and found that, hey, they're seasonal grain eaters on top of that. So during the winter is the only time they're feeding on these grain seeds.

Otherwise, they're generally eating pests that keep us, you know, keep our harvest more safe. Right, exactly. I think that that was the research by Zheng Zhu Xin, I'm pretty sure it's as close as I can get. His research was what led to the sparrows being taken off of the four pest campaign. That's right. So China realized the error of their ways, and they took sparrows off.

But not only did they do that, they started reintroducing them by importing them from the Soviet Union to try to bring the sparrow population back. And slowly over the years, it did bounce back. They're no longer extinct. And there's hundreds of millions of them in China today. but that's still far less than there was before the four pest campaign. Part of the way that they have been able to come back is China outlawed. Talk about just getting mixed messages here.

China outlawed killing sparrows after they took them off the four pest list and had said go kill hundreds of millions of sparrows. Yeah, driving from the sky with pots and pans, break their cute little necks. And then a year later, actually, you're going to go to jail. if you killed more than 20 of them. It's a criminal offense. Yeah.

Isn't that crazy? That's life under an authoritarian government. Tadda. Yeah, for sure. There's been, you know, different sort of versions of the four-pest campaign over the years that's continued. I know we mentioned the bedbugs. I think that was in the 1960s.

Starting in the 80s, rats came back on the scene as far as, you know, a big pest to eradicate. And then in 1998, there was a full sort of reboot. Let's go back to the Four Pest campaign. Remember that TV show we all love back then? Let's reboot it. And new propaganda posters in 1998, kind of like the old style one still. But this is when they added the cockroaches.

So it was flies, mosquitoes, rats, and cockroaches. And that 1980s rat eradication campaign was very successful in 1984 alone, trying to kill an estimated 5% of the entire global rat population. They killed so many rats, one year. Yeah, I mean, they were paying citizens in as late as 2007 to kill individual flies in certain places. Yeah, and I think in 2024, they've started another mosquito campaign, anti-moscito campaign, to try to create the mosquito-free village. So, not bad.

I mean, considering that they got rid of malaria back in, And what year was that? I think they finally, wouldn't it like 2021? They finally said they were malaria-free? Yes. So it did have some positive effects, at least as far as the stupid mosquitoes go.

But the Great Famine, which you just can't talk about the Four Pest Campaign without talking about the Great Famine because they were tied together in some ways for sure. They did a study, I think two different studies in 2023 on the effects, the Great Famine had on people who survived it.

And they found that there are definite differences between people who lived through the Great Famine and people who didn't. Yeah. I believe that it was a higher rate of non-communicable diseases. We're talking diabetes, cancer, psychiatric problems even, than the general population and may have also caused a decline in the male birth rate

all the way through the early 1960s. Yeah, which is really ironic considering the one child policy. you know. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, which I guess either is ironic because of the one-child policy or led to the one-child policy. Yeah. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. The four pests is over. Yeah, I had to hit to Emily for coming up with that. And one little, uh, Lon Yop is obnoxious people call it. Uh, if you want to know what they call sparrows in China, they call them Ma Tje. I've never heard of Lon Yop. Sure you have. I've made that joke before and you thought it was hilarious.

Really? Yeah, it's like an extra little something, like an extra little treat. Okay. I heard it on like the splendid table once. They used it seriously where they were talking about how the bottom of an ice cream cone is filled with a little bit of chocolate to keep the ice cream from melting out the bottom. They called it a little lanyap. Huh.

That formed my impression of the word land yap from that point forward. So in that case, the cherry on top is the chocolate on the bottom. Oh, Chuck. Wow. Wow. Wow. Well, I think obviously Chuck just brought about listener mail. This is joke or not, Josh. So you get to answer this question. We had a few people write in. So I think there was either some confusion of a joke or maybe you just got something wrong. We'll see. Okay.

Hey, guys. The reason I'm writing is because I heard something in the first heavy metal episode that I thought was a joke. But after listening to the audio again and checking the transcript even, I'm wondering if it's just an error and it got through. Mainly because it was so deadpan, but see, buddy, Brian, you can never tell with Josh. Because he can be so deadpan, I've shown over and over and over that I can't tell sometimes if he's joking. Here we go. Josh explained that Black Sabbath got their name from the Boris Karloff movie Black Sabbath, which is true. But the film isn't about a talking boat, winning a regatta for a group of orphans. In the film, Karloff hosts three different horror stories, but none are about a regatta or orphans.

Boris Karloff as an animated talking boat that saved orphans would be amazing at any rate, maybe I'm wrong and Josh was joking and Chuck just missed it or it was explained as such and I missed it but I wanted to pass it along. Rock on, that is from Brian and Brookline, New Hampshire. Nice.

Brian, or Ryan? Brian? Thanks, Brian. So what is it? Let me just walk us through a couple of points real quick and I think it'll become clear. Okay. One is that Black Sabbath, the band,

would name themselves after a movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans? Seems like a joke. And secondly, that a movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans is called Black Sabbath? It was totally made up.

Okay, so is there a talking boat orphan movie and you were just referencing that as a joke or did you just completely Whole Cloth create that? I made that up from Whole Cloth. I don't think there's a movie like that. I can believe it, but I've never heard of one. Well, then in that case, my friend, I give you the Improv Award for the month because you sold it and it was pretty great. Thank you. I appreciate that. That means the world to me.

I couldn't have made up such an outlandish movie plot off the dome like that. Nice. Thank you. And thank you too, Brian, for bringing that to Chuck's attention. I've been waiting a little while. And I'm glad we got a chance to go over it. It was very satisfying. It was very satisfying. If you want to be like Brian and set us up for a satisfying conversation, we love that kind of stuff. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land?

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