Counting the carnivores: Who ate meat in Republican-Era China?

Abstract

It is commonly asserted that Chinese diets before the market and production reforms of the 1980s contained little or no meat. Yet this nearly universal assumption remains untested: Unlike other forms of material consumption, the question of meat in Chinese diets has received almost no systematic attention from historians. Focusing on the early twentieth century, this article examines who in China ate meat, and how meat consumption was shaped by regional and household patterns. It combines insights from three sorts of data. First, Japanese price surveys from the 1920s show a high degree of variation in the preference for one type of meat over others, and the price availability of meat versus wages or other food products. Second, production data, including slaughterhouse tallies and industry estimates of animal by-products show the seasonality of animal slaughter and the vast scale and dispersed geography of China’s livestock production. Finally, nutrition and diet studies from the 1920 to the late 1940s examine actual household consumption, emphasizing how social forces and cyclical fortunes shaped individual choices. The composite picture from these three perspectives confirms that China’s meat consumption was hardly inconsequential. But more than simply triangulating a result, the exercise of comparing perspectives of price, production, and nutrition also highlights the collection of survey data as a series of historical moments.