Beyond the European Model: China’s Developmental Precaution in Cultivated Meat Regulation

Abstract The precautionary principle is widely regarded as a distinctively European legal construct, grounded in science-conditioned risk assessment, provisional measures and a health-protective orientation. This article challenges that assumption by examining how the principle works within China’s own regulatory tradition in the case of cultivated meat, a novel food technology that existing frameworks in both jurisdictions were not designed to address. Drawing on the treatment of cultivated meat under China’s Three New Foods regime and its national biomanufacturing policy, it identifies three ways in which China departs from the European model. The trigger for precaution shifts from scientific uncertainty established through assessment to a default exclusion that presupposes it, precautionary measures become open-ended rather than provisional, and the purpose of precaution widens from protecting health to steering industrial development. These departures form a coherent regulatory logic, termed here developmental precaution. Under this logic, the pace of regulatory opening tracks the readiness of a strategic industry rather than safety alone. China’s case shows that features long treated as intrinsic to the precautionary principle are in fact particular to the European tradition. This supports a more pluralist account of precautionary regulation.