"除四害！" (Eliminate the four pests!), Chinese campaign poster
A green-grey poster headed '除四害！' ('Eliminate the four pests!') shows a long sword driven through a mosquito, a fly and a sparrow, above a dead rat, with a short paragraph of campaign text at upper right. The tell is the single label 'pest' (害) that puts a sparrow in the same category as disease-carrying insects and a rat, so that killing it reads as public hygiene (name-calling); the sword and the dead animals make the call to action physical and immediate, and the poster leans on the fear of disease.
Propaganda techniques used in this poster
- Date
- 1958
- Period
- Cold War
- Made by
- People's Republic of China (issuing body not named on the poster; Commons credits 'China Government')
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Themes, Event, Source, Rights
- Region
- East Asia
- Country
- China
- Medium
- Poster
- Issuer type
- State
- Regime
- People's Republic of China
- Leader
- Mao Zedong
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Mobilize or secure compliance
- Themes
- Health, Home front
- Event
- Great Leap Forward
- Leader
- Mao Zedong
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons, retrieved October 11, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (per Wikimedia Commons)
China Government (credit on Commons), via chineseposters.net and Wikimedia Commons
Text on the object
Original (Chinese) · read from the image, not independently checked
除四害！ [small paragraph, upper right, partly legible: begins 一九五六年起，在十二年内…]
Eliminate the four pests! [small paragraph: 'From 1956, within twelve years…' (remainder not read)]
Headline clear; the paragraph is small and only its opening was read.
