Maoist Pigs

Abstract This article examines pigs and pig raising in rural China during the Maoist period (1949–76). It provides an overall picture of how the state promoted swine keeping and how pigs were cared for, fed, and bred under the collective political economy. The pigs’ diet, the use of swine feces, and breeding practices were determined in alignment with the state's priority of ensuring primitive socialist accumulation—maximizing the extraction of value from the countryside, channeling it to the industrial and urban sectors, and compelling grassroots communes to “self-reliantly” subsist at the minimum level. Rural pigs in Mao-era China were therefore required to occupy densely populated collective pigsties, consume potentially unpalatable and less nutritious native greens, excrete increasingly, and mate with foreign breeds. The daily labor and lives of swine caretakers and breeders were influenced by these demands placed on the nonhuman population. Pigs and those who attended to them in communal pigpens reflected the ideals and limitations of Maoism.