Dr. Michael Tobias
Forbes Magazine
11/02/2012
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Dr. Peter Li, © Dr. Peter Li, 2012 |
Peter J. Li, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of East Asian Politics at the University of Houston-Downtown and China Policy Specialist of Humane Society International, first came to the U.S. from China to study at Syracuse University in 1987. Almost immediately, he had several “cultural shocks,” as he puts it. I asked him about two epiphanies, in particular, which - to my way of thinking - are truly emblematic of one man’s remarkable journey.
Peter Li:
On campus I saw squirrels jumping around and chasing each other. My eyes were wide open, since I had never seen squirrels in my life in China. What a great place where small animals were not afraid of people. Then I went on a school outing to an orchard in the suburbs of Syracuse to experience the life of an ordinary American family. One of the hands-on assignments of this activity was to help pick apples. Before we started, the owner of the orchard told us to leave five or six apples on each tree. “Why do you want to waste them,” I raised my hand and asked. His reply touched the deepest part of my heart. “No, they will not be wasted,” he answered calmly. “We will get a lot of snow in the next few months, and I want to make sure that birds have food for the winter.” I was speechless. Never before in my life had I ever been so touched. What he said caused the collapse of my belief in the selfish nature of capitalists indoctrinated by China’s school system. What he said taught me that a small sacrifice on our part can mean hope of survival for a disadvantaged person or nonhuman individual.
Michael Tobias:
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© J. G. Morrison |
Many economists have examined China with an emphasis on the country’s rapid efforts to reduce its blistering air pollution, increase energy efficiency and agricultural harvests. And there is no question that China’s GDP, and tens-of-millions of per capita incomes, have risen spectacularly during the past three decades. Your chapter for the forthcoming University of Chicago Press book, Ignoring Nature No More - The Case for Compassionate Conservation, (Edited by Marc Bekoff, for a release in March, 2013) is entitled “Explaining China’s Wildlife Crisis: Cultural Tradition or Politics of Development.” Which is it - tradition or developmental politics - and how bad is the crisis?
Peter Li:
China is a comprehensive challenge in environmental protection. Many China experts have researched and written about this subject. The question of China’s animal welfare and animal protection crisis has been largely ignored in China studies in the West. To join the scholarly investigation of China’s environmental issues, I have, in the last 15 years, focused my attention primarily on the country’s animal protection and wildlife conservation challenges.
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Dr. Li observing corrective surgery on a rescued farm bear, © Dr. Peter Li, 2004 |
I have taken many field trips to China, where I visited some 20 factory farms, two tiger farms, two bear farms, and a bear rescue center in Chengdu of Sichuan operated by Animals Asia Foundation. Working as a China Policy Consultant for Humane Society International, I maintain daily contact with the animal protection community in China.
Michael Tobias:
And what can you tell me?
Peter Li:
China is the world’s biggest animal farming nation. Billions of farm animals are raised on the industrialized farms on the Chinese mainland. When I conducted a survey of China’s factory farms in 2005-2006, I saw a nationwide enthusiasm for Western farming practices such as gestation crates, battery cages, ear-clipping, beak-trimming, early weaning (for calves), castration, tail-docking (for pigs), and forced feeding (ducks and geese for weight gains and foie-gras production). While EU nations are phasing out such practices, China is massively employing them. The sheer number of farm animals in China suggests the world’s greatest number of farm animals are raised in welfare compromised farming conditions in China.
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Inside a Chinese layer house, © Dr. Peter Li, 2005 |
Long-distance transport of farm animals from as far north as Inner Mongolia to as far south as the border city near Hong Kong suggests enormous suffering of livestock on that long and dreadful journey. Humane slaughter is a new concept in China. It is yet to become a requirement for the nation’s massive slaughter facilities across the country.
Michael Tobias:
There has been considerable news about the maltreatment of bears in China. What has your research revealed?
Peter Li:
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Bears can live in these cages for up to 20 years, © AAF, 2007 |
Bear farming is arguably China’s most brutal operation. In China today, some 10,000 Asiatic black bears, China’s state-protected species, are caged for life for extracting bile from their gallbladders through an open wound cut in their stomachs. This brutal surgery procedure often causes irreparable damage to their internal organs. Scientists have confirmed the many physical and mental traumas of bear farming. My own visit to two bear farms added additional evidence to the cruelty of this farming operation. When I was visiting China’s biggest bear farm in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, what I witnessed was humanity’s gross inhumanity to an intelligent nonhuman species. China will not be a part of the modern world if bear farming is not outlawed.
Michael Tobias:
As I understand it, China is one of the largest “fur farming” nations?
Peter Li:
It is the largest. In 2005, international animal protection groups exposed the shocking farming and slaughter practices on the fur animals. A recent video a Chinese animal protection group sent me showed the heart still beating in a raccoon dog skinned alive. While the Chinese government is trying to standardize slaughtering procedures, small farmers continue to use wooden sticks to beat the animals to death. But the eating of dogs is increasingly controversial, both among foreign visitors, but also among Chinese youth, some of whom, in 2011, made five rescues along highways where a total of 2,000 dogs had been bound for slaughterhouses.
Michael Tobias:
© Dr. Peter Li, 2012Apparently, in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, the Chinese were quite open about the slaughter of dogs.
Peter Li:
Michael, dog slaughter has long been a hugely offensive scene in China. It is often conducted on the side of the streets in broad view of young children and often conducted in front of other live dogs. Chinese activists continue to call for an end to its inhumanity and this totally uncivilized eating habit.
Michael Tobias:
What about practices in Chinese zoos?
Peter Li:
Terrified tigers and harsh trainer in China's biggest tiger farm in Guilin, © Dr. Peter Li, 2008 The Beijing Zoo, Shanghai Zoo, and Nanchang Zoo are improving their management and animal care conditions, but most Chinese zoos are a sad reminder of humans’ insensitivity to the needs of nonhuman animals and to the feelings of the zoo visitors. Outdated housing and poor management explains some of the most shocking animal cruelty practices such as live feeding, animal performance, photo-ops, and other practices.
Michael Tobias:
China’s remarkably beautiful artistic traditions, poetry, landscape painting (shan-shui), Buddhist and Daoist ethical views all seem to utterly contradict the country’s 20th century animal rights and biodiversity track record?
Peter Li:
© Dancing Star Foundation China does have a cultural legacy of compassion for nonhuman animals. Daoism calls for compassion for all other creatures on earth. Many of China’s Emperors were Buddhist believers who called upon the people to practice vegetarianism, the liberation of animals, and suspension of slaughter in times of mourning or celebration.
Michael Tobias:
So what has happened?
Peter Li:
China’s politics of reform offer us a better explanation for the nation’s animal welfare crisis. Since 1978, China has seen a nation-wide drive for prosperity and, as you know, more than 500 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty. But there remains a collective fear of hunger in the minds of people over the age of 50 in China. And, this fear has a regime stability connotation to the Chinese Communist leaders.
Michael Tobias:
Interesting.
Pete Li:
Deng Xiaoping, China’s reform architect, once remarked that people would revolt if the food security situation could not be improved. So Chinese reforms, initially, were intended to improve the food supply to the 900 million Chinese people, while ethics, morality, social responsibility, environmental impact, labor rights, etc., were often ignored.
Michael Tobias:
And China’s animal abuse concentrates on economic development? I’m thinking, for example, of bears, and pigs.
Peter Li:
Yes. In the case of bear farming, one is speaking of an industry across China that generates annually more than 10 billion yuan (approximately $US 1.6 billion). A bear farm in Mudanjiang in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province is one of the biggest taxpayers of the city. Such income is translated in China as political stability.
Michael Tobias:
Now a Chinese think tank is calling for the rapid phasing out of the country’s one-child policy, which would easily drive the nation’s population to two billion consumers. Even at China’s current population of over 1.34 billion people - the largest human population in history - the animal protection challenge, given this economic context you describe, seems daunting.
Peter Li:
Chinese authorities are not motivated to tackle the problem of animal cruelty for fear that economic growth would be slowed down. Again, that could be interpreted as leading to a regime stability crisis. You referenced pigs. Since meat consumption is so important to the Chinese consumers, like gasoline for Americans, the Chinese government established a “strategic pork reserve” to counter possible vicissitudes in pork supplies on the market.
This also explains why China does not have animal welfare laws or anti-cruelty laws.
Michael Tobias:
None?
Peter Li:
China has lagged behind the industrialized nations in animal protection law-making for more than 180 years.
Michael Tobias:
In your work, you point out what you call “The State’s War against Nature: 1949-1978.” You describe how, in 1958, “this hostility reached a climax in that Mao, the ‘great leader,’ called on the entire nation to engage in a frenzied sparrow killing campaign sending billions of the birds to their brutal death by gunshots, slingshots, bamboo poles, poisons, or out of sheer exhaustion. Truckloads of dead sparrows were paraded on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.” And then, how during a three-year famine that started in 1959, Chinese policies unleashed “one of the most intense assaults [ever] on wildlife.”
Thirty years later, China, as I understand it, finally adopted a “Wildlife Protection Law” in 1988, the first such law in the nation’s history.
Peter Li:
Yes, with two objectives in mind: the conservation of wildlife, and the reasonable use of wildlife animals.
Michael Tobias:
Reasonable?
Peter Li:
The biggest flaw of the Wildlife Protection Law (WPL) is its positioning of wildlife animals as ‘natural resources’ to be used for human benefits. Local authorities and businesses have, however, chosen to use the WPL as their bible to justify their business operations of wildlife exploitation.
Michael Tobias:
Such as?
Peter Li:
Bear farming is the best example of local authorities jealously protecting the cruel farming operation in regions under their jurisdiction. Over the years, we have heard China’s central government officials expressing concerns over bear farming and other wildlife exploitation operations. We have not heard local officials voicing the same kind of concerns. To local officials, closing bear farms could trigger a ripple effect leading to demands for closing other businesses found to be environmentally, ethically, or socially questionable.
Local growth and local GDP growth rate are direct indicators of leadership or performance qualifications, as judged by those higher up in the political hierarchy in Beijing. Upward career mobility in the reform era for local officials has been closely tied to their ability to generate local growth, create employment and generate revenue. Therefore, local support for animal abuse related industries and production has a lot to do with the reform politics and the Chinese Communist Party Center’s cadre evaluation policy.
Michael Tobias:
So across China, at the local level, it’s a political quagmire guaranteed to perpetuate animal suffering?
Peter Li:
Local protectionism is manifested in many different ways. In addition to direct incentives such as preferential land use right, tax breaks, less red tape, local authorities also provide a production environment that is “obstacle-free.” Businesses are not expected to meet any environmental standards or labor standards. Local businessmen, particularly those businesses that are big local taxpayers, are showered with all kinds of honors. Some of them are “elected” deputies to local and provincial people’s congresses. In China, there is no other better way to show support to local businesses than to make them government officials.
Michael Tobias:
So a fur farmer, for example, who is, so to speak, “successful” is a local hero.
Peter Li:
Well, consider the fact that fur farming can employ directly or indirectly up to 50% of the labor in a farming community, thus making it an indispensable tax contributor to a local government. Local authorities find it hard not to support this production in their localities.
Michael Tobias:
You’ve stated that “Never in its 5,000-year history did China ever raise and keep hundreds of millions of wildlife species in captivity as it is today.” And you went on to ask, which I find pretty courageous on your part, “Are the Chinese culturally predestined to be indifferent to animal suffering?”
Peter Li:
Many Chinese mainlanders (I am using this word to distinguish Chinese on the mainland from those in Taiwan and Hong Kong) are, in my opinion, possibly indifferent or insensitive to animal suffering (to varying degrees). But let me also state for the record that, again in my opinion, they themselves are not to blame. Neither is Chinese traditional culture to blame. People become indifferent or insensitive perhaps because they have been socialized to be so, particularly under Mao, when sympathy for the downtrodden, love of pets, wearing make-up, and displaying individual taste in fashion were all condemned as bourgeois and rebellious.
Michael Tobias:
What about current consumption patterns in China?
Peter Li:
Today, Chinese consumers, according to a recent BBC report, eat twice as much meat as those in the United States. This is not surprising. China surpassed the US as the world’s biggest meat producer in 1990, and the Chinese authorities have long looked to the industrialized West as the object of emulation in meat production. While Westerners greet each other by asking “how are you,” Chinese people traditionally greeted each other by saying ‘Have you eaten?’”
Michael Tobias:
That’s very interesting.
Peter Li:
I guess how people feel is more important to Westerners, while if people are hungry or not was more important to the Chinese. When I met some of my old classmates back in China 30 years after graduation, I was some 40 pounds lighter than they were. They actually wondered if I got enough to eat in the US.
Today, people “greet” friends and relatives at a dinner table that may involve lavish banquets of 24 courses of mostly meats and “delicacies from the mountains and seas.”
Michael Tobias:
Which is pretty terrifying when one considers, as you have elsewhere pointed out in your chapter for the forthcoming Marc Bekoff book, that China’s “rapid industrialization” and other increasing human intrusions “have threatened the survival of 398 species of vertebrates” across China. This raises issues, of course, with regard to what is generally thought of as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), in terms of the exploitation of Chinese biodiversity - with so many species on the brink of extinction, like South China tigers, the Chinese river dolphin, the Chinese alligator and Mongolian gazelle among many others. You’ve cited a 2004 China State Forestry Bureau release that indicated numerous known extinct species in China.
Peter Li:
Progressive and forward-looking TCM doctors have vowed not to use wildlife animal products as ingredients. Indeed, farmed wildlife parts, allegedly claimed as natural ingredients by supporters of the bear farming industry, are not natural products at all. Scientists have confirmed that bile collected from bear farms is often contaminated with drug residues, blood, pus, germs, and cancerous cells.
Tiger bone wine made from dead tiger bones has, at best, a dubious curative effect. The claimed healing power of tiger bone wine for rheumatism, to take but one example, can be replaced by other medicines.
In fact, one has to ask whether all these allegedly indispensable and life-saving ingredients for illnesses ranging from eye irritations to cancers, coma, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and even liver transplants are really nothing more than the wildlife farming industry capitalizing on the anxiety of patients.
Today, bear bile, for example, has been used in cosmetics, toothpaste, and tonic products for profits contravening government policies that are aimed at limiting its use in a selected number of prescriptions. Consumption of wildlife is most rampant in South China, where it has been promoted as body-building, disease-preventing, and manhood enhancing. But in the past, the consumption of wildlife was never deemed an honorable food choice, and was limited to communities that were economically backward. Today’s runaway consumption of wildlife in South China has no precedent in China’s past.
Michael Tobias:
So what does the future look like for animal protection in the world’s most populous nation?
Peter Li:
Animal suffering is unprecedented in China in magnitude in both numerical terms (having the largest number of nonhuman animals in farming units) and in welfare conditions. With regard to China’s ranking on a global report card, so to speak, I would not hesitate to say that it may be at the bottom, if not the very bottom. Why do I say so? Look at the facts: Mainland China does not have a comprehensive animal protection law. Animal cruelty is not a punishable offense. China has the world’s largest number of animals in the industrialized farms. China’s continuing development model gives priority to productivity increase defined in terms of material gains. China’s pro-business politics has made societal voices for animal protection a nuisance to policy-makers and the business communities alike. The overall political environment is against activism for animal protection, certainly in the foreseeable future.
Michael Tobias:
And for a nation that looks to the West for any kind of development templates, there are plenty of lamentable missteps.
Peter Li:
That’s exactly right. Canadian seal slaughter, dolphin massacres in Japan and Denmark, rodeos in the U.S., bullfighting in Spain, fox hunting in the U.K., bear baiting in Pakistan.
Michael Tobias:
And yet, I’ve detected in our discussions a certain optimism on your part?
Peter Li:
China is changing beyond recognition in many areas. Dog eating is rejected by the majority of the younger generation, many of whom are the single child of their parents. They have no recollection of hardship days and are enormously more sensitive to suffering. They demand and get care and love. To them, it is natural for the same kind of emotional care to be given to others including nonhuman animals. Many of these youngsters display great sympathy and compassion for the disadvantaged. Those who stopped the trucks of dogs on China’s highways were all young Chinese activists; members of China’s burgeoning animal protection movement.
Also keep in mind, Michael, China today has an estimated 130 million dogs, many of whom are household pets. As a result, China’s animal protection community is expanding. Some Chinese activists estimated that as many as 30 to 50 million Chinese are animal lovers, bigger than the total population of Canada.
Chinese animal protectionists are one of the most active interest groups in China. They have also been very successful. In 2010, they succeeded in stopping a proposed Spanish bullfighting introduction project. In 2011, they succeeded in stopping the introduction of American rodeos to China. Since 2010, Chinese activists have campaigned against Canada’s attempt to market seal meat in China.
Recently, more officials who graduated from humanities and social sciences are entering politics. It is expected that these officials will have a more complex vision of China’s development.
Michael, China is an integral part of the global economy and the third largest contributor of tourists. A humane China is only a matter of time. I am optimistic about the animal protection in China in the not too distant future.
Michael Tobias:
Thank you, Dr. Li!
© Michael Charles Tobias/Jane Gray Morrison/Dancing Star Foundation, 2012. Special Thanks to Dr. Marc Bekoff and to Ms. Jane Delson.