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A History of in : From Curious Omnivores to Industrial

Brian Lander, Mindi Schneider and Katherine Brunson

Abstract China is now home to half of the world’s 1.3 billion pigs, which is not surprising given the central role pigs have played in the subsistence and culture of China for millennia. The close relationship between pigs and people began over 8000 years ago when humans began to manage and gradually domesticate wild pigs. While pigs initially foraged around settlements, as human populations grew people had to pen their pigs, which became the household’s trash disposal facilities and producers of , an important agricultural . Since people were now responsible for feeding and breeding their pigs, they bred the ones that matured and fattened quickly and produced larger litters. Early Modern Europeans found these fat, fecund breeds far superior to their larger native ones, and bred the two to create the breeds of pigs now employed in industrial pork production around the world, including China. In recent decades, industrial that scientifically control every aspect of pigs’ lives have spread rapidly, as had pork production. Until recently, most Chinese people ate pork only on special occasions; their ability in recent decades to eat it regularly has exemplified China’s increasing prosperity. Vast areas of North and South American farmland are now devoted to growing soybeans to feed Chinese pigs, and the methane, manure and resistance produced by hundreds of millions of pigs create environmental and health problems on a global scale.

A who doesn’t raise pigs is like a scholar who doesn’t read books 種田不養豬，秀才不讀書”. An old Chinese saying1

1. Introduction

Winston Churchill is rumored to have said “I like pigs: dogs look up to us; cats look down on us; pigs treat us as equals.”2 While pigs may have seen a kindred spirit in Churchill, his statement reflects the opinion widely held by those who have looked a in the eye: that they look back at us with confidence and intelligence. And we do have a lot in common with pigs. We are both gregarious omnivores whose dietary flexibility engendered a curious disposition as well as simpler digestive physiology and metabolisms than more specialized feeders. We are around the same size, and have similar skin, inner organs, and cardiovascular systems.3 By being intelligent omnivores, we have both flourished across many different environments. The partnership between humans and domesticated has been so successful that we have replaced most of the other on earth: humans and our now make up over 95% of mammalian biomass on earth, half of which is composed of humans and pigs.4 The relationship between people and pigs began as a partnership, but humans now raise pigs in a relationship that can only be described as exploitation.

Chinese pigs have played a leading role in the global history of pigs. China today is home to half of the world’s 1.3 billion pigs.5 Not only did pigs occupy an important place in the history of Chinese and cuisine, but most pigs eaten in the world today descend in part from pigs that were domesticated in China thousands of years ago. Chinese bred pigs that mature

1 Chen Hengli 陳恆力, ed., Bunongshu jiaoshi 補農書校釋 (Beijing: Nongye chubanshe, 1983), 62. This 17th century text introduces this saying with “ancient people said.” 2 Jennifer Speake, Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (OUP Oxford, 2015), 82. 3 M. Michael Swindle and Alison C. Smith, eds., Swine in the Laboratory: Surgery, Anesthesia, Imaging, and Experimental Techniques (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2015). 4 The total dry biomass of all living humans is estimated at 0.06 gigatons (sixty million metric tons) of carbon (Gt C) and that of livestock is estimated at 0.1 Gt C, of which 0.021 Gt C is composed of pigs. In contrast, the total biomass of all wild animals has been reduced to a mere 0.007 Gt C. the Yinon M. Bar- On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018, 201711842; Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 5 Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, “Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade,” 2018, https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/livestock-and-poultry-world-markets-and-trade. 1 and reproduce far more quickly than other pigs, which early modern Europeans bred with their own pigs to produced “improved” breeds that were distributed around the world, laying the basis for the modern industrial pig. This paper traces the history of pigs in China from wild pigs through their long history as village pigs, to their current status as capitalist pigs.6 Along the way, it will show how pig history and human history have become inseparable.

Apart from being the first synthetic history of Chinese pigs in any language, this paper makes other contribution to our understanding of the relationships between people and animals. Most histories of animals focus on the relationships between people and animals in a given time and place rather than considering the long history of these relationships.7 Furthermore…

2. The Domestication of Pigs

Pigs are gregarious even-toed, hoofed mammals whose short stature makes them well-suited for moving through dense vegetation.8 Wild pigs live in groups of varying sizes and use their large ears not only to listen for danger, but also to hear one another’s grunts and squeals. This may be why a group of pigs is called a sounder. Their large heads end in their most famous feature, their highly sensitive and flexible noses, which they use to root in the ground for . They have the simple stomachs of animals that eat a wide variety of plants and animals, rather than the complex stomachs of ruminants like that can digest coarse, low-nutrient plant matter.

There are about 16 species of wild pigs in the world, ranging in size from under 20 to over 600 lbs. They include the peccaries of the Americas, babirusa of Indonesia, warthogs and river pigs of Africa, and various species of the Sus genus, which originated, and still has its highest diversity, in Southeast Asia.9 The ancestor of the is Sus scrofa, the , whose native

6 Sam White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Cultures and Evolutionary History,” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011): 94–120. 7 Though some works do consider that long history more generally, such as Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 8 This section based on Lyall Watson, The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004). 9 Greger Larson et al., “Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centers of Pig Domestication,” Science 307, no. 5715 (2005): 1618–21. 2 range extends across Eurasia from North Africa to Indonesia, but is now found in feral form in many parts of the Americas, Australia, and many other places. Their ability to thrive in such diverse habitats and their success in making themselves essential to humans, even as farms replaced their forest habitat, shows how tough and adaptable pigs are.

Like most pigs, wild boars live in groups. Sows reach sexual maturity at about 8-10 months and begin mating around 18 months. Gestation usually lasts just under four months, after which sows give birth to litters of 4-8 piglets, usually once a year.10 Groups of mothers and their litters often band together in groups.11 While females stay with their mothers until they begin mating, males leave voluntarily or are expelled from the sounder, often coming together in groups of young males who wait their turn to challenge older males for the chance to mate. Wild pigs are not territorial, but tend to have fixed spots in their range, such as those for sleeping (which can occupy half of their time) and for defecating, which is generally done at a single spot separated from their sleeping and eating areas. Pigs are not the filthy creatures they are popularly imagined to be, though they have little choice if confined in dirty pens.12

Genetic and zooarchaeological evidence indicates that pigs were domesticated from wild boars in multiple locations across Eurasia. 13 This process began with people managing wild boar populations, which were clearly valued because people transported them by boat from mainland Eurasia to both Cyprus and Japan.14 Zooarchaeological evidence of gradual changes in skeletal morphology and culling practices in Anatolia suggest that the period of managing wild herds was

10 F.W. Bazer, J.J. Ford, and R.S. Kensinger, “Reproductive Physiology,” in Biology of the Domestic Pig, ed. W.J. Pond and H.J. Mersmann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 150–224. 11 R.M. Nowak, Walker’s Mammals of the World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1054–58. 12 Brett Mizelle, Pig (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). 13 Allowen Evin, Keith Dobney, and Thomas Cucchi, “A History of Pig Domestication: New Ways of Exploring a Complex Process,” in Ecology, Conservation and Management of Wild Pigs and Peccaries, ed. Mario Melletti and E. Meijaard (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 39–48; Max Price and Hitomi Hongo, “The Archaeology of Pig Domestication: Methods, Models and Case Studies,” n.d. 14 Jean-Denis Vigne et al., “The Early Process of Domestication in the Near East. New Evidence from the Pre-Neolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic in Cyprus,” Current Anthropology 52, no. S4 (2011): S255–S271; Hitomi Hongo et al., “Hunting or Management? The Status of Sus in the Jomon Period in Japan,” in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 109–30. 3 followed by several millennia of gradual domestication.15 Domesticated pigs were then introduced to Europe, where they continued to interbreed with wild populations.16

In China, pigs were domesticated at least once and perhaps multiple times. Zooarchaeological evidence suggest that they may have been domesticated independently in the Yellow, Yangzi, and Liao River valleys.17 The earliest archaeological evidence for pig domestication in the Yellow River Valley comes from the site of Jiahu in Henan (ca. 9000-7800 years ago), where changes in the size and shape of teeth, an increased proportion of pig bones compared to those of other animals, and the fact that pigs were killed at a younger age all point to management of pigs by humans.18 Several other sites in the Yellow River Valley have similar evidence.19 There is also archaeological evidence that pigs were independently domesticated in the Yangzi River Valley.20 And growing zooarchaeological evidence suggests a potential third center of domestication in the Western Liao

15 Anton Ervynck et al., “Born Free? New Evidence for the Status of Sus Scrofa at Neolithic Çayönü Tepesi (Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey),” Paléorient 27, no. 2 (2001): 47–73; Hitomi Hongo and Richard H. Meadow, “Privy-Pigs in Prehistory? A Korean Analog for Neolithic Chinese Subsistence Practices,” in Ancestors for the Pigs: Pigs in Prehistory, ed. Sarah Nelson (Philadelphia: Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology, 1998), 11–25; Richard Redding and Michael Rosenberg, “Ancestral Pigs: A New (Guinea) Model for Pig Domestication in the Middle East,” in Ancestors for the Pigs: Pigs in Prehistory, ed. Sarah Nelson (Philadelphia: Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology, 1998), 65–76. 16 Greger Larson et al., “Ancient DNA, Pig Domestication, and the Spread of the Neolithic into Europe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 39 (2007): 15276–81; Claudio Ottoni et al., “Pig Domestication and Human-Mediated Dispersal in Western Eurasia Revealed through Ancient DNA and Geometric Morphometrics,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 30, no. 4 (2013): 824–832. 17 For an in-depth discussion of pig domestication and the varied uses of pigs in prehistoric China, see Luo Yunbing 羅運兵 Luo, Zhongguo gudai zhu lei xunhua, siyang yu yishixing shiyong 中國古代豬類馴化飼 養與儀式性使用 (Beijing: Kexue, 2012). 18 T. Cucchi et al., “Early Neolithic Pig Domestication at Jiahu, Henan Province, China: Clues from Molar Shape Analyses Using Geometric Morphometric Approaches,” Journal of Archaeological Science 38, no. 1 (2011): 11–22; Luo Yunbing 羅運兵 and Zhang Juzhong 張居中, “Henan Wuyang xian Jiahu yizhi chutu zhu gu de zai yanjiu 河南舞陽縣賈湖遺址出土豬骨的再研究,” Kaogu, no. 1 (2008): 90–96. 19 Jing Yuan and Rowan K. Flad, “Pig Domestication in Ancient China,” Antiquity 76, no. 293 (2002): 724– 32; Qi Guoqin 祁國琴, Lin Zhongyu 林種雨, and An Jiayuan 安家瑗, “Dadiwan yizhi dongwu yicun jianding baogao 大地灣遺址動物遺存鑒定報告,” in Qin’an Dadiwan 秦安大地灣, ed. Gansu sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo (Beijing: Wenwu, 2006), 861–910; Loukas Barton et al., “Agricultural Origins and the Isotopic Identity of Domestication in Northern China,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 14 (2009): 5523–28. Qi’s zooarchaeological data suggests that domestic pig exploitation at Dadiwan may have begun 7800-7300 years ago, but Barton’s study of bone stable isotopes suggests a date after 6000 years ago. 20 Yuan Jing 袁靖 and Yang Mengfei 楊夢菲, “Dongwu yanjiu 動物研究,” in Kuahuqiao 跨湖橋, ed. Zhejiang sheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo and Xiaoshan bowuguan (Beijing: Wenwu, 2004), 241–69; Yuan and Flad, “Pig Domestication.” 4

River Valley of Manchuria, where pigs were used in ritual practices. Entire pig skeletons were found in a high-status burial at the site of Xinglongwa (ca. 8200-7400 years ago) and pig skulls were frequently found in pits and buried under houses.21

While zooarchaeological evidence suggests three independent domestication events, DNA evidence is less clear. Mitochondrial DNA analyses of living domestic pigs in East Asia show that they cluster into several lineages—two of which are centered in the Yellow River Valley and Yangzi River Valley regions—which also suggests that these two regions were centers of domestication.22 However, ancient DNA research reveals that the earliest pigs in all three regions belong to the same mitochondrial DNA lineage, so domestic pigs were either introduced from the Yellow River region or there was parallel domestication in these regions during the initial stages of domestication.23 These studies also suggest long-term genetic continuity between ancient and modern Chinese domestic pigs, which means that Chinese pigs are direct descendants of indigenous wild boar populations. 24 Therefore, we can be certain that the middle Yellow River region was a center of domestication, but the evidence for additional independent domestication events in other regions of China needs further investigation.

Regardless of whether pigs were domesticated once or several times in East Asia, early pig exploitation in all three regions is linked to significant socioeconomic changes beginning about 9000 years ago. Neolithic peoples came to rely on crops like millet and rice, domesticated dogs, began to make ceramics and ground stone tools, and settled down to live in permanent villages. 25

21 Yuan Jing 袁靖, “Zhongguo gudai de jiazhu qiyuan. 中國古代的家豬起源,” in Xibu kaogu 西部考古, ed. Xibei daxue (Xi’an: Sanqin chubanshe, 2006), 44–47; Luo, Zhongguo gudai zhu lei xunhua; Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo, “Neimenggu Aohanqi Xinglongwa juluo yizhi 1992 nian fajue jianbao 内蒙古敖漢旗興隆洼聚落遺址 1992 年發掘簡報,” Kaogu, no. 1 (1997): 1–26. 22 Larson et al., “Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar”; Greger Larson et al., “Patterns of East Asian Pig Domestication, Migration, and Turnover Revealed by Modern and Ancient DNA,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 17 (2010): 7686–91. 23 Hai Xiang et al., “Origin and Dispersal of Early Domestic Pigs in Northern China,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017): 5602–5602. 24 Larson et al., “Patterns of East Asian Pig Domestication”; Xiang et al., “Origin and Dispersal of Early Domestic Pigs.” 25 Li Liu and Xingcan Chen, The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Xiaohong Wu et al., “Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China,” Science 336, no. 6089 (2012): 1696–1700; Xiaoyan Yang et al., “Early Millet Use in Northern China,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 10 (2012): 3726–30. 5

This was a gradual process. In both ends of Eurasia, pig domestication was characterized by several millennia of increasing management and domestication of wild boar during the slow transition in human subsistence associated with the emergence of early farming societies.

Given that most other Eurasian domestic species were only domesticated once, it is worth asking why pigs were domesticated multiple times. Scholars once assumed that pigs were domesticated as people captured and then raised them. It is increasingly clear that pigs played an active role in this process, at least in the early stages, by frequenting human settlements to scavenge on crops or human trash. During these forays, tamer individuals would have come into closer contact with humans and formed a relationship that gradually led to domestication. This is also how dogs were domesticated, and is known as a commensal pathway to domestication.26 Since pigs are omnivores that are naturally well-adapted to human ecosystems, there were many opportunities for domestication as humans modified landscapes during the development of agriculture across several regions of the world.27 Pigs were not only tasty and nutritious, they also helped clear human settlements by eating rubbish, and were thus well worth keeping around.28

People in Neolithic China continued to exploit wild boar and other wild animals long after pigs were first domesticated. 29 Early domestic pigs probably continued to interbreed to some degree with wild boars. Genetic research shows that ancient gene flow between wild and domestic stocks was common for pigs as well as many other species including horses, donkeys, cattle and reindeer.30 In parts of island Southeast Asia and Oceania people pen female domestic pigs at night

26 Melinda A. Zeder, “Pathways to Animal Domestication,” in Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, and Sustainability, ed. Paul Gepts et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 227– 59; Melinda A. Zeder, “The Domestication of Animals,” Journal of Anthropological Research 68, no. 2 (2012): 161–190; Greger Larson and Dorian Fuller, “The Evolution of Animal Domestication,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 45 (2014): 115. 27 Nicole L. Boivin et al., “Ecological Consequences of Human Niche Construction: Examining Long-Term Anthropogenic Shaping of Global Species Distributions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 23 (2016): 6388–96. 28 This was also true of dogs in China and elsewhere: Aaron H. Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 18–19; Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 67–106. 29 Yuan Jing 袁靖, “Lun Zhongguo xinshiqi shidai jumin huoqu roushi ziyuan de fangshi 論中國新石器 時代居民獲取肉食資源的方式,” Kaogu xuebao, no. 1 (1999): 1–22. 30 Fiona B. Marshall et al., “Evaluating the Roles of Directed Breeding and Gene Flow in Animal Domestication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 17 (2014): 6153–58. Charleen 6 but allow them to roam freely during the day and breed with feral males, which they also hunt.31 This is a useful model for thinking about how people in Neolithic China may have kept pigs. The presence of populations around the world today is further evidence that domestication is a fluid process.32 Moreover, boar are one of the few species of larger wild animals that have remained widespread in China, even as farms have replaced forests.33

Agricultural societies in the Yellow and Yangzi river valleys became increasingly hierarchical after about 7000 years ago. Domestic pig exploitation also intensified as pigs became closely tied to competitive feasting and status displays. 34 As in other parts of the world, socio-political competition promoted increasing exploitation of key domestic plants and animals. Archaeologist Bryan Hayden argues that the first plant and animal domesticates were important for their uses in ritual feasting events and only gradually became dietary staples, and this may well be true of pigs in East Asia.35 The archaeological record reveals that pigs were commonly used in sacrificial and funerary rituals,36 but did not become dietary staples in the Yellow River Valley until after about 6000 years ago.37 In other regions of China, pigs did not become dietary staples until several

Gaunitz et al., “Ancient Genomes Revisit the Ancestry of Domestic and Przewalski’s Horses,” Science 360, no. 6384 (2018): 111-114. 31 Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Redding and Rosenberg, “Ancestral Pigs.” 32 Abraham H Gibson, Feral Animals in the American South: An Evolutionary History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Thomas Fleischman, “‘A Plague of Wild Boars’: A New History of Pigs and People in Late 20th Century Europe,” Antipode 49, no. 4 (2017): 1015–34. 33 Andrew T. Smith and Yan Xie, eds., A Guide to the Mammals of China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 452. 34 Thomas Cucchi et al., “Social Complexification and Pig (Sus Scrofa) Husbandry in Ancient China: A Combined Geometric Morphometric and Isotopic Approach,” PLoS One 11, no. 7 (2016): e0158523; Liu and Chen, The Archaeology of China; Luo, Zhongguo gudai zhu lei xunhua. 35 Brian Hayden, “Were Luxury the First Domesticates? Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives from Southeast Asia,” World Archaeology 34, no. 3 (2003): 458–469; Brian Hayden, “Nimrods, Piscators, Pluckers, and Planters: The Emergence of Food Production,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9, no. 1 (1990): 31–69. 36 Seung-Og Kim, “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China,” Current Anthropology 35, no. 2 (1994): 119–141; Li Liu, “Mortuary Ritual and Social Hierarchy in the Longshan Culture,” Early China 21 (1996): 1–46; Luo, Zhongguo gudai zhu lei xunhua; Yuan and Flad, “Pig Domestication.” 37 Cucchi et al., “Social Complexification”; Xiaolin Ma, Emergent Social Complexity in the Yangshao Culture: Analyses of Settlement Patterns and Faunal Remains from Lingbao, Western Henan, China (c. 4900-3000 BC) (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005); Ma Xiaolin 馬蕭林, “Linbao Xipo yizhi jiazhu de nianling jiegou ji xiangguan wenti 靈寶西坡遺址家豬的年龄結構及相關問題,” Huaxia kaogu, no. 1 (2007): 55– 74. 7 millennia after that.38 By the Bronze Age, pigs had developed diverse socioeconomic roles that ranged from basic subsistence to political rituals—especially ancestral rites.

3. Pigs during China’s Historical Period, c.1000 BCE-1978 CE.

The main historical difference between the pigs at each end of Eurasia is that pigs in Europe continued to forage in forests and interbreed with wild boar into modern times,39 while those in China were increasingly penned.40 As population growth in the lowlands of China reduced the amount of wild land on which pigs could forage, people had to pen their pigs and take full responsibility for their feeding and breeding. Because people had to dedicate resources to feed pigs, they started to breed pigs that produced larger litters and that grew and reached sexual maturity more quickly. Rising population and reduced shared resources also led to other forms of intensification like silviculture and , evidence that once-common resources like trees and fish had become scarce enough that people were forced to produce them.41 Under these conditions, pigs were increasingly valued not only for meat, but also for eating the family’s rubbish and producing manure.

Across Eurasia historians seeking historical records of pigs often find that “since pigs for the most part were taken for granted, their existence did not generate much commentary.” 42 Chinese documents frequently mention horses, cattle and , herds of which were valuable resources that could be taxed. Because pigs were owned in small numbers by the plebian masses and could not be easily taxed, neither the literate elite nor the state was interested in them. For this reason, they are rarely mentioned in China’s many texts on agriculture, husbandry and animal medicine. Horses—essential both for armies and for those eager to display their higher status—received

38 Yuan, “Lun Zhongguo xinshiqi shidai jumin huoqu roushi.” 39 James J. Parsons, “The Acorn-Hog Economy of the Oak Woodlands of Southwestern Spain,” Geographical Review 52, no. 2 (1962): 211–35; A.T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 190–216; Michel Pastoureau, Le cochon: histoire d’un cousin mal aimé (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 40 Fiona B. Marshall et al., “Evaluating the Roles”; Larson et al., “Patterns of East Asian Pig Domestication.”

42 Robert W. Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), xiii. 8 vastly more attention in the literature, despite being far less common.43 Nonetheless, there is enough evidence to reconstruct the general history of pigs in the historical period.

Oracle bone inscriptions of the late 2nd millennium BCE, the earliest Chinese writing, contain abundant records of wild and domestic pigs (豕) being hunted and sacrificed, and contain terms for adult female (豕+匕), adult male (䝅 or 豭), castrated (豖), young (豚) and wild (彘) pigs.44 The character jia (家), which depicts a pig under the roof of the family’s temple, where it was sacrificed to ancestors, seems to have metonymously become the standard term for family, physical house and then, later, pig pen.45 It is now the standard Chinese word for family and the second part of “nation-family” (guojia 國家), the Chinese word for country and state.

By 2000 years ago there were tens of millions of people in the North China Plain, which had been converted almost entirely to farmland, leaving little extra land for foraging pigs.46 Over the subsequent millennium the lower Yangzi region also became densely populated. A 13th century CE agricultural treatise states that lakes and mountains were the best places in that region to raise pigs, presumably because they were the only places that still had wild plants for pigs to eat.47 Similarly, an 18th century manual states that while pigs near mountain forests could be fed acorns, chestnuts, leaves and herbs, and those near lakes could be fed aquatic plants, farmers in other areas had to collect tree leaves for pigs and also feed them their own crops, like melons, leafy plants and Chinese yams.48

43 For example, a bibliography of premodern agricultural treatises lists over 70 titles on horses and cattle but only two on pigs, one of which is lost, the other devoted to veterinary medicine: Wang Yuhu 王毓瑚, Zhongguo nongxue shulu 中國農學書錄 (Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 2006). 44 Wang Yuxin 王宇信 and Yang Shengnan 楊升南, eds., Jiaguxue yibai nian 甲骨學一百年 (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian, 1999), 544; Adam C. Schwartz, “Huayuanzhuang East I: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Oracle Bone Inscriptions” (Ph.D. thesis, The University of Chicago, 2013). 45 David N. Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China, ca. 1200-1045 B.C. (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 2000), 111. 46 Hans Bielenstein, “Chinese Historical Demography A.D. 2-1982,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 59 (1987): 193. 47 Chunghao Pio Kuo, “Pigs, Pork and : The Practice of and the Consumption of Pork in Ming-Qing China” (Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 2013), 75. 48 Zhang Zongfa 張宗法, Sannongji jiaoshi 三農紀校釋 (Beijing: Nongye chubanshe, 1989), 585. 9

The growing density of human populations helps explain why pigs became so common. While the increasing agricultural population eliminated larger wild mammals from the lowlands of China,49 it also reduced the availability of land for sheep, cattle and horses, with the result that the role of these animals in Chinese agriculture was much smaller than in that of most other parts of Eurasia, though sheep and goats were still common in hilly or arid regions with marginal farmland.50 The only domesticated animals able to thrive in most villages were pigs, dogs and chickens, all omnivores able to live in by eating whatever was available.

Image 1: Ceramic models of domestic pigs excavated from the Yang Mausoleum in Xianyang, Shaanxi, the tomb of Emperor Jing, the fourth emperor of the Western Han Dynasty (d. 141 BCE).51

Although most households raised pigs, they raised only a few each year, which they slaughtered for important celebrations like the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and weddings. While these were the only times many people ate fresh pork, they also preserved meat and saved to cook with after the festivities ended.52 Lard was commonly used to fry vegetables, and was valued for the flavor it imparted. Because pig diets were composed primarily of carbohydrates (in the form of coarse plants and kitchen scraps) with very little protein, the meat of most Chinese breeds was

49 Brian Lander and Katherine Brunson, “Wild Mammals of Ancient North China,” The Journal of Chinese History 2, no. 2 (2018): 291–312. 50 Francesca Bray, Science and Civilisation in China 6.2: Agriculture, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 51 Thanks to Jiao Nanfeng 焦南峰, director of the Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology, for permission to use these images from the Han Yangling Museum, online at www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/640948. 52 On the long history of preserving meats in China, see H.T. Huang, Science and Civilisation in China 6.5: Fermentations and Food Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 10 fattier than contemporary pork. Cooking methods and dishes were based on this characteristic and the forms and flavours it produced. Fat contains more than twice as much energy as carbohydrates or proteins, and was often a delicacy in agrarian societies in which people were more likely to be hungry than obese.53 Many Chinese pork dishes, most famously Mao Zedong’s favorite “red braised ”, consist mostly of tender lard.

Given how rarely common people ate pigs, they might have considered them not worth the effort of raising them if they had not also provided other substantial services, namely cleaning up waste and producing fertilizer. The ability of pigs to clean up villages by eating almost every kind of waste was probably valued from early times. Stable isotopes extracted from pig bones found at Neolithic sites in North China indicate that pigs ate plenty of human food waste and other rubbish.54 As populations grew, pig manure became increasingly important. Population growth reduced the amount of arable land per person, forcing people to reduce fallows and plant crops more often on the same land, which was only possible with fertilizer. For poorer farmers who rarely had the luxury of eating their pigs, manure production was often the main purpose of raising them. This paper’s epigraph, “a farmer who doesn’t raise pigs is like a scholar who doesn’t read books”, means that pig manure is as important to farmers as books are to scholars. This was likely written by a member of the literate elite who wanted to praise manure, not a farmer seeking to disparage books.

People in early China often built privies over pig , an ingenious way to provide pigs a safe living space that was also a waste-disposal system and convenient source of manure. We know of these privies from many ceramic figurines buried in tombs from the Han Dynasty (c. 200 BCE- 200 CE), presumably to ensure that the dead had access to a good toilet, a rubbish bin, manure and pork. Given their proximity to houses, the pens were probably cleaned regularly to reduce the

53 Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 121. 54 Elevated δ13C levels indicates that pigs ate plenty of millet and elevated δ15N levels reflect significant meat, feces, or food grown in manure, in their diets. Barton et al., “Agricultural Origins”; Cucchi et al., “Social Complexification”; Ying Ma et al., “Isotopic Perspectives (Δ13C, Δ15N, Δ34S) of Diet, Social Complexity, and during the Proto‐Shang Period (ca. 2000–1600 BC) of China,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 160, no. 3 (2016): 433–445; Ekaterina A. Pechenkina et al., “Reconstructing Northern Chinese Neolithic Subsistence Practices by Isotopic Analysis,” Journal of Archaeological Science 32, no. 8 (2005): 1176–89. 11 smell. Agricultural treatises emphasize the importance of keeping them clean for the health of the pigs. We should not assume that privy pigs lived in piles of filth. People were acutely aware of the danger of diseases to pigs, which are mentioned in several works.55 The fact that people and pigs lived in proximity for millennia allowed them to share many diseases, although how and when this happened remains unclear.56

Image 2: Ceramic model of a privy over the pen of a nursing sow with piglets excavated from a Western Han (final two centuries BCE) tomb in Jiyuan, Henan.57

While people kept pigs for sanitation, manure and food, pigs were much more than just possessions; they were also intelligent beings with whom farming families interacted every day and thus had

55 Kuo, “Pigs, Pork and Ham,” 87–110. 56 Jessica M. C. Pearce‐Duvet, “The Origin of Human Pathogens: Evaluating the Role of Agriculture and Domestic Animals in the Evolution of Human Disease,” Biological Reviews 81, no. 3 (2006): 369–82; Serge Morand, K. Marie McIntyre, and Matthew Baylis, “Domesticated Animals and Human Infectious Diseases of Zoonotic Origins: Domestication Time Matters,” Infection, Genetics and Evolution 24 (2014): 76–81. 57 Image from http://www.chnmus.net/dcjp/201204/16/content_56735.htm. Originally published in Henan sheng bowuguan, “Jiyuan sijiangou san zuo Han mu de fajue" 濟源泗澗溝三座漢墓的發掘, Wenwu, no. 2 (1973): 46–56. 12 meaningful relationships.58 As with subsistence farmers and herders around the world, people paid careful attention to the wellbeing of their pigs, not only because they were valuable, but because they were members of families and communities. The fact that these were genuine relationships is not diminished by the fact that people ended up eating or selling the pigs.

The 6th century agricultural manual, Essential Techniques for the People, which was written in the North China Plain, contains a brief section on raising pigs.59 It recommends that females with short snouts and no soft hair should be chosen for breeding, based on the logic that short-snouted pigs fatten more quickly and soft fur is difficult to extract when making leather. It advises farmers to raise female piglets separately from their mothers in order to fatten them more quickly, but leave male piglets with their mother to create a family bond that would discourage males from running away when they were let out to forage. It suggests letting pigs out to forage in the warmer seasons and stockpiling various agricultural residues like chaff and brewing dregs to feed them during the winter months. It also contains instructions on , incubating newborn piglets in a steamer, and suggests half-burying cart wheels to make pens which allowed piglets, but not their mothers, to move freely in and out. Many of these practices were later adopted by industrial pig farmers.

While pigs had an important place in the domestic economy, they became valuable wherever there were markets. China has been a mercantile society for well over 2000 years. Butchers served an important role. They sold small quantities of meat so that people who could afford to eat meat could do so without having to kill a whole pig. Hundreds of pigs were slaughtered every day in large cities, like 12th century Hangzhou.60 As commerce expanded after around 1500, people increasingly raised pigs for market. A division of labor emerged in which services like castration were performed by travelling specialists.61

58 On the nature of human-pig relationships, see Malcolmson and Mastoris, The English Pig. 59 Jia Sixie 賈思勰, Miao Qiyu 繆啟愉, and Miao Guilong 桂龍, Qimin yaoshu yizhu 齊民要術譯注 (: Shanghai guji, 2006). 60 Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962), 46; Kuo, “Pigs, Pork and Ham,” 71. 61 Kuo, “Pigs, Pork and Ham,” 92–107. 13

The result of millions of farmers breeding pigs over millennia was the creation of a wide variety of regional breeds. In 1960, China’s first national survey of indigenous livestock identified more than 100 indigenous pig breeds, with countless locally-adapted varieties that could thrive in a variety of landscapes and climatic conditions.62 Chinese pigs were carried across southeast Asia and the Pacific as far as Hawai’i.63 Eventually they were carried to Europe, where they were bred with local pigs to create the industrial hog breeds which now constitute most of the world’s pigs.

4. The Contribution of Chinese Pigs to Modern Breeds

The Romans developed a breed of short, fat, pen-raised pigs that were markedly different from the semi-wild foraging types, and probably had some similarities with Chinese penned pigs. But these pigs disappeared along with the Roman empire and its pork-loving aristocracy.64 In contrast, pig breeding continued without disruption throughout Chinese history. By the 17th century, China’s pigs matured and fattened much faster and had more offspring than European pigs. In Europe, pigs continued to interbreed with wild boar. Because ships frequently carried live pigs to eat on the voyage, it is not surprising that Chinese pigs began to arrive in Europe, where farmers bred them with native breeds. This was a decisive event in the history of pigs. Sam White has argued that European pigs produced meat so inefficiently that they might have dropped out of the modern meat altogether if Europeans had not discovered Chinese pigs.65

62 P. Cheng, “Livestock Breeds of China,” FAO Animal Production and Health Paper, no. 46 (1984). 63 Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 64 Mark Essig, Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 65–76; Michael MacKinnon, “High on the Hog: Linking Zooarchaeological, Literary, and Artistic Data for Pig Breeds in Roman Italy,” American Journal of Archaeology 105, no. 4 (2001): 649–73. 65 This and the following paragraphs draw from White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs.” 14

Image 3: The “common boar” on the left is a depiction of the native British breed of domestic pigs, while the image and text on the right reveal how highly the mixed breeds were regarded.66

Differences in maturation rates and litter size between wild boar and Chinese pigs illustrate the degree to which the latter were selectively bred for fast and vigorous reproduction. Wild boar reach puberty in 8-10 months and have litters of 4-8, while Chinese Meishan pigs can reach puberty in three months, have litters of around 15 piglets, and often produce two litters per year.67 English pig farmers began to breed their pigs with Chinese imports no later than the 18th century, greatly increasing meat productivity. This occurred in the context of increasingly commercialized agriculture, in which large farms produced for the market, competing not only with other pork producers, but also with other meat producers generally. The goal was to improve taste and, most importantly, to raise pigs that grew faster and bigger than English varieties, thereby reducing the cost of raising them. While pigs in China had often been raised for sale, the incessant competition characteristic of early capitalism led English farmers to experiment with pigs more systematically and consistently than had occurred in China.

66 Thomas Bewick, A General History of Quadrupeds., The 8th ed. (Newcastle upon Tyne: T. Bewick, and son; Longman and co. London; and Wilson and sons, York, 1824). Hathitrust digital edition. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nc01.ark:/13960/t6f19zq64. 67 “Breeds of Livestock - Meishan Swine.” http://afs.okstate.edu/breeds/swine/meishan/ 15

As late as 1700 CE, English pigs spent much of their time foraging for food, regularly interbreeding with wild or feral pigs, and took a year and a half to reach maturity.68 Over the following 150 years, English farmers bred their stockier domestic breeds with fatter, quick-maturing Chinese breeds to produce such breeds as Yorkshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and Suffolk, which could grow large enough to slaughter in as little as nine months.69 The interbreeding of Chinese and Western pigs has continued since then. In the 1970s and 80s, European and American breeders imported high- fertility pigs to produce new breeds. Breeders continue to experiment with crosses between these kinds of pigs. 70 While indigenous Chinese pigs continue to exhibit local genetic variation based on millennia of local breeding,71 most of the world’s domestic pigs today are descendants of these European-Chinese breeds.

68 White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs,” 105. 69 White, 108; Mirte Bosse et al., “Genomic Analysis Reveals Selection for Asian Genes in European Pigs Following Human-Mediated Introgression,” Nature Communications 5 (2014): 4392. 70 Steven McOrist, “Native Pig Breeds of China,” Pig Progress 25, no. 3 (2009), https://www.pigprogress.net/Breeding/Genetics-Al/2009/5/Native-pig-breeds-of-China-PP005933W/; Zhonglin Tang et al., “Effect of Breed, Sex and Birth Parity on Growth, Carcass and Meat Quality in Pigs,” Frontiers of Agriculture in China 2, no. 3 (2008): 331–37. 71 Hendrik-Jan Megens et al., “Biodiversity of Pig Breeds from China and Europe Estimated from Pooled DNA Samples: Differences in Microsatellite Variation between Two Areas of Domestication,” Genetics Selection Evolution 40 (January 15, 2008): 103. 16

Image 4: “More pigs make more fertilizer and raise grain production.” 1959 poster.72

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, China’s population grew by hundreds of millions, forcing people to farm ever more marginal land, and to intensify production by carefully using pig and human manure.73 Mao Zedong praised pigs as “fertilizer factories”, pointing to their importance in agricultural production and productivity, and in underwriting the predominantly plant-based diets that defined China for thousands of years.74 When Mao met with Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and the two countries normalized relations, the Chinese government asked to purchase several modern nitrogen fertilizer factories. China’s production of synthetic has grown exponentially since then, greatly diminishing the agricultural importance of pig manure just as it began to be produced in ever greater quantities.75

5. Industrial pigs in modern China

The most dramatic change in the relationship between people and pigs in China since domestication has occurred over the past four decades as pig farming has industrialized using methods developed in wealthy countries.76 As pigs move from household farm to factory farm, the rapid changes in the sites, scales, forms and relations of pig production have profound socioenvironmental impacts. In the 1970s, there were around 500 million pigs on earth. By 2018, farmers and companies in China alone produced almost 55 million tonnes of pork from a domestic swine herd of 710 million head. This was more than twice the amount produced in the and almost five times the amount in the United States. China was also the world’s largest pork importer in 2018, bringing in 1.5 million tonnes, or 19 percent of total global pork trade.77

72 Yang Wenxiu 楊文繡, “Zhu duo, fei duo, liangchan gao 豬多肥多粮產高” (Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1959), https://chineseposters.net/posters/pc-1959-013.php. 73 Donald Worster, “The Good Muck: Toward an Excremental History of China,” RCC Perspectives, no. 5 (2017): 1–54. 74 Sigrid Schmalzer, “Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place in a Chinese County,” Geographical Review 92, no. 1 (2002): 1–22. 75 Robert B. Marks, China: An Environmental History, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 311–16. 76 E.g., Mark R. Finlay, “Hogs, , and the Industrial Environments of Postwar Agriculture,” in Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History, ed. Susan Schrepfer and Philip Scranton (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 237–60. 77 United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, “Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade.” 17

Although “traditional” ways of farming remain in some places, China’s is now a modern, globalized pork industry. Half of the world’s pigs, half of the world’s pork production and half of the world’s pork consumption now occur in China.78

The industrialization of pig farming began soon after the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, the government initiated its program of “Reform and Opening” in which agricultural markets were selectively opened to private commerce. The countryside was decollectivized, which divorced social welfare benefits and food provisioning from work units and communes. Pork production and consumption have skyrocketed since then, transforming global meat markets and resource flows. As early as 1979, increased production in China helped made pork the most produced and consumed meat in the world. Policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s aimed at developing a domestic livestock industry and increasing meat consumption. Pork became a . was opened as a new site for investment and profit. The structure of China’s pork sector shifted towards the industrial model that dominates global production.79

Until 1985, as much as 95 percent of all the pork in China was produced by smallholder farmers who raised fewer than five pigs a year. By 2009, the smallholder share had declined to 27 percent. In 2015, the pork sector was comprised mostly of medium-scale household farms (up to 500 pigs per year), large-scale commercial farms (500-10,000 pigs per year), and mega-operations (more than 10,000 pigs per year).80 Rural people are increasingly giving up pig raising, migrating to cities where they provide China’s booming economy with poorly-paid laborers. As happened in the 20th century West, people are moving into cities where their only connection with farm animals is when they eat them.81 Their pork is supplied by agribusiness and large-scale livestock operations.82 These local-global dynamics extend to other parts of the pork chain and reflect broader changes in Chinese society, economy and environment.

78 http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/themes/en/pigs/home.html 79 Jody Emel and Harvey Neo, Political Ecologies of Meat (Milton Park: Routledge, 2015). 80 Allison Fok and Alice Hui, China Pork: A Meaty Task to Meet Demand, DBS [Development Bank of Singapore] Asian Insights, Sector Briefing No. 45 (Singapore, 2017). 81 Bulliet, Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships. 82 Li Jian, “The Decline of Household Pig Farming in Rural Southwest China: Socioeconomic Obstacles and Policy Implications,” Culture & Agriculture 32, no. 2 (2010): 61–77. 18

Breeding and Feeding the Modern Hog The transformation of pig farming illustrates how local-level changes simultaneously reshape the global system, starting with the body of the pig itself. The pigs that populate China’s pork industry are modern hogs; “improved breeds” of partly Chinese ancestry, as described above, which transnational and domestic genetics firms import from Europe and the United States. The most popular breeds in China, and in the world, are of the Duroc, Landrace and Yorkshire types, commonly abbreviated “DLY.” In contrast to the gregarious, omnivorous domestic pigs of premodern China, the modern hog is made explicitly to survive and thrive in industrial conditions. Bred to be the living component of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, modern hogs have one purpose: to convert the least amount of grain and oilseed-based feed into the highest amount of lean muscle in the shortest possible time. With limited physical activity - these pigs spend their short lives living tail-to-snout in the small space of the CAFO - converting grain to meat is only possible through breeding programs that carefully tailor pigs to be muscle-producing machines, helped along by a combination of industrial feed mixes, antibiotics and the controlled environment of the CAFO.

Modern hogs are replacing indigenous Chinese pigs. The national survey of indigenous livestock in 1960 that identified more than 100 indigenous pig breeds was followed by a second survey in the 2000s that found only 88 domestic breeds. The survey concluded that two decades of exotic breed importation had caused the extinction of eight breeds, left 31 endangered and that 85 percent of indigenous pig breeds had declined in numbers.83 By 2010, over 90 percent of the pork produced in China was from DLY pigs and indigenous-exotic hybrids, according to an official in the livestock division of China’s Ministry of Agriculture.84 Indigenous breeds are increasingly raised only on specialty “boutique pig” farms or on state-funded and largely privately-run conservation farms tasked with preserving genetic diversity.

83 Cheng, “Livestock Breeds of China”; Hongjie Yang, “China’s Second National Animal Genetic Resources Survey,” in The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, 2015), 247; Hongjie Yang, “Livestock Development in China: Animal Production, Consumption and Genetic Resources,” Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics 130, no. 4 (2013): 249–251. 84 Interview No. 58, Ministry of Agriculture, Beijing, 17 September 2010. 19

A major change in China’s pig-raising strategy relates to what pigs eat. Before the reform era, which began in 1978, pigs in China were raised on weeds, grass, crop residues, kitchen scraps and other readily available feedstuffs. The modern hog eats modern feed, which has more protein. In the late 1970s, China’s leaders supported development of a milling industry to provide compound livestock feeds using grains and oilseeds. However, with 21 percent of the world’s population but only nine percent of arable land, feeding China’s pigs without starving China’s people has required re-routing , investment and resource flows to import huge quantities of feed. The government recognized that China’s soybean output could not keep up with the massive growth planned for the livestock industry. It began to liberalize the soy sector in the 1990s, allowing imports to overtake both exports and domestic production.

After being a leading soybean exporter for decades, China became a net importer in 1996. It emerged as the world’s largest soybean importer in 2003. By 2014, China imported almost 60 percent of the total global soybean trade (70 million tonnes) for its livestock feed industry.85 Maize imports are also rising. The party-state increasingly encourages Chinese agribusiness firms to seek access to land, resources and markets abroad.86 The result is that large areas of North and South America are now used to grow feed for China’s pigs, fuelling the ongoing destruction of ’s cerrado grasslands and the southern Amazon.87 The impact also extends into the oceans: in 2006 about 20 percent of global production of fish meal went to pigs.88

China has adopted the science and practice of the global pork industry, including its approach to excrement. Manure is no longer a valuable fertilizer, but a crippling source of pollution. The purpose of traditional pig farming was “to fertilize crops and have a recipient for table scraps,”

85 Gustavo De L. T. Oliveira and Mindi Schneider, “The Politics of Flexing Soybeans: China, Brazil and Global Agroindustrial Restructuring,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 1 (2015): 1–28; Yan Hairong, Chen Yiyuan, and Ku Hok Bun, “China’s Soybean Crisis: The Logic of Modernization and Its Discontents,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 373–395. 86 Mindi Schneider, “Developing the Meat Grab,” Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 4 (2014): 613–33. 87 United States Department of Agriculture, “Brazil’s Latest Agriculture Frontier in Western Bahia and MATOPIBA,” https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/highlights/2012/07/Brazil_MATOPIBA/. See also Enrico Parenti and Stefano Liberti’s 2018 film Soyalism. 88 Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere, 211. 20 while pork production was secondary.89 The massive expansion of China’s swine herds has led to an explosion of manure that is no longer wanted due to the ubiquity of chemical fertilizers. Some of the nearly five billion tonnes of manure produced each year ends up in waterways, causing blue- green algae outbreaks, and making water unusable for many households, most of them rural. In 2010, the first national pollution census identified manure from industrial livestock facilities – mostly pigs, but also chickens – as China’s number one source of water pollution. The government is encouraging consolidation in the pork industry on the assumption that large-scale, modern facilities are better able to control their pollution.

Crisis, Consolidation, and Consumption From the beginning of the reform era, the government has favored agribusiness firms known as “Dragonhead enterprises” to lead agricultural development and manage agricultural markets. In exchange for financial and policy support, they have a double mandate to open agricultural markets and integrate rural producers into agricultural value chains. First introduced in the 1990s, dragonhead-led, vertical integration now accounts for more than half of crop, livestock and aquaculture production in China. Pork is an example of how vertical integration and agribusiness development has put Chinese firms like the WH Group and COFCO, on par with, or in the position to overtake world-leading, transnational companies.90 In addition to vertical integration, these companies are also experimenting with vertical production. The Yangxiang company is building a production base in Guangxi Province that will raise 30,000 sows and 840,000 piglets annually in high-rise buildings. The base has a seven-story and a nine-story production building. A 13-story building will be the tallest “pig hotel” in the world when it is completed in 2020.91

Manure production and disease have recently driven further consolidation. Manure dumping has become a focus of environmental policy and law since 2015. Increased fines and “name and shame” campaigns have driven industrial pig production away from urban areas towards rural areas, which

89 Heng-wei Cheng et al., “Pork Production System and Its Development in Mainland China,” International Journal of Fisheries and Aquaculture 3, no. 8 (2011): 166–74. 90 Mindi Schneider, “Dragonhead Enterprises and the State of Agribusiness in China,” Journal of Agrarian Change 17, no. 1 (2017): 3–21. 91 Kees van Dooren, “Yangxiang Aims High with Sows on Many Floors,” PigProgress, 2018, https://www.pigprogress.net/World-of-Pigs1/Articles/2018/4/Yangxiang-aims-high-with-sows-on-many- floors-275164E/. 21 tend to have less environmental monitoring. Increased enforcement of environmental regulations has forced hog producers lacking the capital to absorb fines and taxes to close or relocate. Pig epidemics have had similar effects. Pork prices skyrocketed after the 2006 epidemic of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome killed thousands of pigs and led governments to cull hundreds of thousands more. The government increased support for large-scale, industrialized and standardized pork production to stabilize the industry and protect against future price shocks.92 These measures successfully boosted the national swine herd, and supported larger-scale, intensified production.93 The African swine fever epidemic of 2018 reveals that the problem has not been solved.94

The rapid spread of these diseases suggests that the modern hog is vulnerable. As genetic diversity has narrowed to the point that most of China’s 700 million pigs belong to one of three breeds (Duroc, Landrace, and Yorkshire) or their hybrids, their ability to fend off disease has been drastically compromised. Industrial pig producers are dealing with this biological reality with antibiotics and increased regulation of the bodies and activities of workers. Before entering pig barns, workers are sanitized, wrapped in protective gear (protective for the pigs, not the workers) and often quarantined for days or weeks before being allowed contact with the “improved breed” pigs. 95 As elsewhere, the use of antibiotics by Chinese livestock producers has spawned a generation of antibiotic-resistant, disease-causing organisms that are found in the soils around large-scale pig farms, in water and in human guts. 96 Farm managers include subtherapeutic

92 Jimin Wang and Mariko Watanabe, “Pork Production in China: A Survey and Analysis of the Industry at a Lewis Turning Point” (Chiba: Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization, 2008), http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Publish/Download/Asedp/077.html. 93 Michael Woolsey and Jianping Zhang, “China, People’s Republic of: Livestock and Products Semi- Annual Report 2010” (Beijing: United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service, 2010). 94 Rob Schmitz, “A Deadly Virus Threatens Millions of Pigs in China,” National Public Radio, September 13, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/13/646277592/a-deadly-virus-threatens- world-s-largest-pork-supply. 95 Alex Blanchette, “Herding Species: Biosecurity, Human Labor, and the American Industrial Pig,” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 4 (2015): 640–69. 96 Xiuling Ji et al., “Antibiotic Resistance Gene Abundances Associated with Antibiotics and Heavy Metals in Animal and Agricultural Soils Adjacent to Feedlots in Shanghai; China,” Journal of Hazardous Materials 235 (2012): 178–185; Yi Luo et al., “Trends in Antibiotic Resistance Genes Occurrence in the Haihe River, China,” Environmental Science & Technology 44, no. 19 (2010): 7220–25; Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). 22 antibiotic doses in feed rations, which has probably saved some pigs from some diseases, they but is ineffective against viruses, which are the most serious threat. This also helps develop antibiotic- resistant diseases that threaten both pigs and people.97

Of all the issues associated with China’s industrial pork sector, food safety concerns receive the most media and government attention.98 Pork consumers in China are concerned about growth promoter residues, following several high-profile cases of the growth promoters clenbuterol and being found in meat. Given the poor reputation of Chinese food products in the US, it is worth pointing out that the use of these chemicals in meat production is illegal in China, but they are everyday components of pork production in the United States.99 Middle-class, urban consumers tend to prefer pork from factory farms or from foreign sources, which they view as better regulated than “backwards” small-scale peasant farmers.100 But the opposite trend is also blossoming in “alternative food networks,” including farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture and , whose customers also cite food safety as their primary motivation for participation.101

As pigs and pig production in China have changed, so too has the meat. For most of China’s history, people ate relatively little pork. When they did, they valued its high fat content and its lard. Industrial pork has become lean meat due to the much higher proportion of protein in commercial grain and oilseed-based feed mixes, combined with the characteristics of the industrial breeds. This lean meat is not the meat that enlivens Chinese culinary traditions. It does not meet the taste preferences of middle-aged and older Chinese people who have memories of pre-reform pork. Still,

97 Mara Hvistendahl, “Public Health. China Takes Aim at Rampant Antibiotic Resistance,” Science 336, no. 6083 (2012): 795; Luo et al., “Trends in Antibiotic Resistance Genes Occurrence in the Haihe River, China,” 7220. 98 Yang Song, Xuemei Li, and Lishi Zhang, “Food Safety Issues in China,” Iranian Journal of Public Health 43, no. 9 (2014): 1299–1300. 99 This has proved a sticking point when Chinese corporations have purchased US pork producers: Mindi Schneider and Shefali Sharma, China’s Pork Miracle? Agribusiness and Development in China’s Pork Industry (Minneapolis; Geneva: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2014), 23. 100 Xiu Q. Ma et al., “Which Product Characteristics Are Preferred by Chinese Consumers When Choosing Pork? A Conjoint Analysis on Perceived Quality of Selected Pork Attributes,” Food Science & Nutrition 5, no. 3 (2017): 770–775; Marcia Barcellos et al., “Consumer Attitudes to Different Pig Production Systems: A Study from Mainland China,” Agriculture and Human Values 30, no. 3 (2013): 443–455. 101 Yan Shi et al., “Safe Food, Green Food, Good Food: Chinese Community Supported Agriculture and the Rising Middle Class,” International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 9, no. 4 (2011): 551–558. 23 the market for pork continues to grow and consumption continues to rise. Processed and packaged pork products are the fastest-growing market segments. And while China’s pork has become leaner, China’s people have not. There are now more obese and overweight people in China than in any other nation in the world.102 Pork is certainly not the only culprit, but it is an important component of changing eating habits that have led to expanding waistlines and the emergence of diet-related diseases and causes of death.

Conclusion The long and complex relationship between people and pigs in China in many ways exemplifies the environmental history of humanity in the agricultural era. As humans domesticated more and more species, we were able to replace natural ecosystems with ones increasingly composed of species that benefitted us, a process that has made humans and associated species one of the main forces affecting the earth’s biosphere, and increasingly its climate. The relationship between pigs and people that was once beneficial for both of us now has significant downsides for both species.

In order to understand the history of pigs, it is critical to understand the history of pigs in China where they have been central to human life for millennia. Over the last nine thousand years, people in China domesticated pigs, kept them near their households as sources of manure, and ate their meat at times of feasting or celebration. However, the relationship between pigs and humans has changed fundamentally in the last few decades as industrialized pork production has replaced household pig raising. A long-term perspective on the environmental history of pigs in China reveals how different—and damaging—modern pig raising practices are from what characterized the vast majority of our history of interactions with pigs. Current industrialized pork production is unsustainable and has dire consequences for the environment and human health. Perhaps solutions may lie in reviving and modifying traditional or even very ancient practices for pig raising used in earlier periods of China’s history.

102 M. Mariachiara Cesare et al., “Trends in Adult Body-Mass Index in 200 Countries from 1975 to 2014: A Pooled Analysis of 1698 Population-Based Measurement Studies with 19.2 Million Participants,” The Lancet 387, no. 10026 (2016): 1377–96. 24

While increased availability of meat has undoubtedly increased the health of people in China over the past generation, feeding soybeans to pigs is an extremely inefficient way to produce food. While it may not be literally unsustainable to replace much of South America’s remaining forests and grasslands with soy farms to feed pigs, it is hard to justify when humans could just eat the soy. Within China, the massive scale of meat production has serious consequences for humans. The fact that the influenza virus and various other diseases can spread between pigs and people means that high concentrations of pigs are perfect sites for the development of diseases that could easily spread to humans. Moreover, the heavy use of antibiotics risks creating global diseases impervious to exiting medicines. The massive quantities of manure produced by industrial pig farms not only constitute severe pollution in themselves, they also produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. For these, and other reasons, high consumption of red meat is globally unsustainable.103 The Chinese tradition of treating pork as a luxury food eaten only on special occasions was probably the right idea.

103 Marco Springmann et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits,” Nature 562, no. 7728 (2018): 519–25. 25