As coronavirus rages, all China’s eyes are on Xi Jinping – and the pigs
One little piggy went to market, one little piggy got sick, one little piggy got culled —and joined 40 percent of China’s little piggies that went wee-wee-wee all the way to burial pits.
During the past 19 months, the world’s largest pork market lost almost half of its pigs to an illness that went unreported and unchecked, and is now crossing borders threatening livestock elsewhere in Asia and the world.
Global worries about the coronavirus as a global pandemic are just the latest public-health scare that took flight in China. The African Swine Fever has run rampant in the People’s Republic since 2018 and has devastated the country’s pork production and markets.
The collapse of oil prices and demand, the wildly volatile stock market, and the social disruption across America due to the Coronavirus pandemic are all serious. So is any global threat to food stocks.
Pork is a staple meat for the Chinese and a primary source of protein in the People’s Republic of China. The bad news? The hog stock has collapsed, and the pig population is decimated. There is little to do about this immediately in a country where pork production is done in conditions dominated by small farms and backyard pigsties. Industrialized production is not widespread.
China lacks an effective USDA-type system to manage the domestic quality and conditions for pork production. It was only a matter of time before China got hit with the type of widespread animal disease that is now running rampant – and often unreported - in the country.
The good news is that there is little time between a moment of pig infection and death. That means very little time for farmers to take infected, contagious, and dangerous pork to market for human consumption - though there are plenty of cases of tainted pork making into foodstuffs. So many of China’s pigs are infected nationwide that all pork is suspect. Only half of the current pig populations — which have tripled in price — survive to make it to the dinner table.
A quarantine is the best chance for containing the menace, but the swine sickness is slipping across regional borders and slowly making nearby pork production vulnerable. Add to the problem a general unwillingness to share information about the infected stocks, and you have a wider global catastrophe in the making. Australia has already detected and interdicted tainted pork products and just invested $43 million for biosecurity personnel, equipment and preventive measures.
Countries are not always happy to air their dirty laundry or share news of their latest health scares or viral epidemics with the rest of the world. There is the danger that it will cause panic, force businesses and travelers to avoid the country and highlight the difference in public health and medical standards between developed and developing nations.
In China’s case, it can also challenge the Core leader’s political standing and party power. Chairman Xi Jinping is likely feeling the smoldering social backlash from the virulent and initially unmanaged novel coronavirus. Xi is also sweating bullets in his quietly contested position, where the long knives are not visibly out, but whispered criticism and raised eyebrows suggest questions about whether his stewardship in times of crisis has been competent and coherent.
Xi recently moved quickly to express symbolic leadership and responsiveness to the cornavirus in Wuhan, showing up in a face mask to walk around city markets. China, too, has used its autocratic power and upped its state surveillance tools to force quarantines and social behavior to slow the COVID-19’s outbreak spread among citizens.
China’s proactive measures are not limited to humans, with a top-down directive that pigs be increasingly produced and slaughtered in controlled, scalable and standardized pig farms. Thirteen-story high-rise “hog hotels” are being built in parts of the country.
For local and regional Chinese rulers, it is often more important to hide from Beijing a problem like infected pigs and sick people than to have to deal with bad news and expensive solutions. In all parts of the world where government authorities are seen as part of the problem, political leaders and bureaucrats give this narrative credence by behaving badly and avoiding accountability. It becomes a vicious cycle.
Developing countries often cut corners. Petit corruption and payoffs are everywhere. Every official form signed or checked permit becomes an opportunity for shady transactions and payoffs. The smaller the stakes, the more desperate the conditions, the more prevalent the “baksheesh” bribery system of profiteering from poverty.
If Xi successfully turns around the narrative of China’s early structural failures regarding the coronavirus pandemic, he could come out as a stronger leader with more pervasive and threatening tools to control society. If, however, the pork crisis continues into a third year, the big, bad urbanly dense Chinese population might just huff and puff and blow Xi’s house down.
Markos Kounalakis is considering vegetarianism. He is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
