Swine Industry of China

Abstract

C HINA, the country with the world's largest human population, has also the world's largest swine population according to the estimates of the U. S. Department of Agriculture as well as those prepared by the Chinese National Agricultural Research Bureau. The number of hogs approaches sixty-three million, or approximately one-fourth of the world total, 23.3 per cent (Figure 1). In contrast to swine culture in the United States where the number of hogs is second to China and where no swine were raised until European exploration and settlement, Chinese hog husbandry is a very old industry, the hog having been domesticated there as early as 3000 to 2000 B.C. In the Shang Period (1776-1122 B.C.), to judge by the Oracle Bones recently excavated, the horse, ox, sheep, dog, and pig appear to have been the only domesticated animals. That the pig was domesticated as well as hunted in its wild state at that time is indicated by the pictographs of hogs with and without arrows transfixing them. Moreover, the ideographic character of the Chinese home shows a pig under the roof (Sowerby, Arthur, Domestic Animals of Ancient China Journal, October 1933). The production of Chinese swine differs strikingly from that of both the United States and Denmark. In the latter country pigs are produced by what has been described as dairy-by-product feeding, while the corn feeding of the former country is well known. China, however, has a unique way of raising swine, a way which the writer has chosen to call the scavenger method. Pigs are fed on refuse from the table, and refuse from cultivated fields, on food that would go to waste were it not utilized by the most efficient food producer of any domestic animal. The manure made available by swine production is probably of more importance to the Chinese farmer than to the agriculturist of any other major swineproducing country in the world. Fertilizers are sorely needed to keep productive the intensively cultivated fields that provide food for China's densely populated nation. Indeed, in the mind of the average Chinese farmer the hog is probably considered a machine or converter into which he puts so much waste or raw material, receiving in turn manure which is indispensable to the realization of his crops. Though hogs may have extreme significance to the Chinese peasant as a source of manure, as many authorities state, the fact remains that swine probably furnish the most important meat item on the farmer's menu. Religion and custom influence the condition more than they do in most pork-producing countries. According to Mr. Lee, Chinese graduate student from the University of Wisconsin, Buddhist tradition fosters belief that the displeasure of heaven is visited upon people who kill cattle for food. Pork, mutton, and chicken offer no such handicap, but mutton finds little favor among the peasants, and thus pork and chicken constitute the important meat element in the diet. While chicken and other fowl are widely consumed, they are probably more expensive than pork as a regular ration, and consequently when neat is eaten, cheaper pork and lard are the meats most likely to be chosen. Moreover, hogs