KEY POINTS:
It's a bad time for cockroaches, flies, rats and other vermin in China.
With Olympic hygiene forcing its way on to the national agenda, collecting dead flies can earn you good money.
A suburb in the central Henan province has set a bounty on dead flies in a move reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward when citizens were ordered to kill sparrows and other pests.
The district of Xigong, which is in Luoyang in Henan, shelled out out more than 1000 yuan ($170) for about 2000 dead flies on July 1, the day it launched the scheme with the aim of encouraging cleanliness in residential areas.
In April of this year, Beijing restaurateur Guo Zhanqi said he would buy flies for two yuan each to help clean up the city for the Olympics.
Guo is giving out cash to anyone who presents him with the dead insects, and is trying to encourage a nationwide anti-fly campaign.
"No flies, new Beijing. No flies, great Olympics" is Guo's slogan, a clever take on the Beijing Games slogan in Chinese.
It's the latest sign of how next year's Beijing Olympics are bringing about all kinds of changes in a country fiercely proud of the forthcoming sporting extravaganza. Some of these campaigns are eerily reminiscent of old-school Communist schemes that older people still hold dear.
The Olympics, which start on August 8, 2008, at 8 pm - eight is a lucky number in China - have led to all kinds of ground-breaking initiatives in the capital. There are efforts to stop people spitting, littering and queue-jumping, and taxi drivers are being told to learn English. Billboards advertising overtly capitalist pursuits are disappearing from the city.
Both anti-pest campaigns are very much in the mould of Chairman Mao Zedong's campaign against the "Four Harms" in the 1950s, which targeted rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes.
Citizens were given strict instructions to kill the four species and that campaign became famous because the efforts to control both earthbound and flying vermin involved banging pots and pans to scare sparrows into flight and have them eventually drop to earth dead from exhaustion.
Sparrows, included on Mao's hate list because of their predilection for grain, were eventually rehabilitated because without them, locusts and other pests thrived, wiping out thousands of hectares of agricultural produce. Their natural predators had been wiped out.
- INDEPENDENT
