What was the Four Pests Campaign?

# Summary

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck dive into China's Four Pests Campaign, a massive government-led eradication effort launched in the late 1950s under Mao Zedong targeting rats, mosquitoes, flies, and sparrows as part of the Great Leap Forward. The campaign was brutal and widespread, with citizens organized into teams to kill these animals by any means necessary—from swatting flies to banging pots and pans to exhaust sparrows from the sky. While the hosts walk through the jaw-dropping statistics (like nearly 10 trillion flies killed) and the initial public health motivations behind the campaign, they also explore how catastrophically wrong things went when the removal of sparrows, which ate insects but not much grain as officials believed, led to massive locust infestations that devastated crops during an already devastating famine.