With less than 10% of the world’s arable land, China is home to 17.2% of the world’s population and half of the world’s pigs. In 2024, China slaughtered 702 million pigs and produced over 58 million tons of pork—most consumed domestically—making it the world’s largest pork producer and consumer. Like petroleum in the U.S., pork in China is a matter of national security, requiring strategic reserves to stabilize supply and prices during crises. As America’s reliance on oil shaped its landscapes, China’s rising appetite for pork and its expanding middle class has transformed both the city and countryside for decades. But how? What sorts of spaces, architectures, and landscapes are created by pork infrastructure, and how did it enable production to more than quadruple in four decades? How have these shifts changed perceptions of animals, food, and nature with the context of rapid urbanization and, more recently, state-led campaigns for rural revitalization?
Ran Mei’s dissertation research, tentatively titled "Making Pigs with Chinese Characteristics", examines the history of architecture, infrastructure and ecologies of China's livestock farming and meat production through the case of pigs and pork from the 1930s to the present. At NYU Shanghai, Mei will be focusing mostly on archival research looking at agricultural policy and rural planning documents, newspaper articles and advertisements for pig farms or pork products, rural/environmental planning maps, and livestock management manuals, with the goal to map the historical trajectory of pig farming and pork production in the context of agricultural modernization and rural development from the Republican Era to the Reform Era. Besides archival research, Mei will also be reaching out to and talking with experts in the fields of animal science, livestock management, farm design, rural planning, and environmental governance to trace the genealogy of pig farming and pork production from backyard operations to highly-intensive, industrialized, and vertically integrated operations. Mei is hoping to work closely with Prof. Yifei Li at NYU Shanghai because of their overlapping interests in China's environmental governance and food system issues.