Introduction
In the early twentieth century, with the unprecedented expansion of state power and the adoption of modern public health principles, China began establishing government-run public abattoirs to monopolize animal slaughtering: all animals had to be inspected by professional veterinarians in these abattoirs before they could legally be butchered and sold in markets. However, the only noticeable impact for animal owners and consumers was that their transactions had become more complicated and expensive, while meat quality remained unsatisfactory; they deemed such a monopoly an unjustified intervention in their lives. This study analyzes why public abattoirs in the Republican era left such a negative impression on contemporary Chinese people.
In the historiography of early twentieth-century China, the public health system of Tianjin, which concerned food safety, represents the mode of Chinese modernization following forced encounters with Western influence.Footnote 1 Admittedly, Beijing, Shanghai, and Qingdao launched public slaughterhouses earlier than Tianjin, but they were initiated by social elites or foreign powers. While the Chinese authorities of many municipalities in Manchuria had launched public abattoirs by 1910, they were established in compliance with Japanese sanitation decrees.Footnote 2 By contrast, the Tianjin government opened its public abattoirs out of its own hygienic initiatives and firmly retained control of the abattoirs from their opening in 1918 (several other cities also opened public slaughterhouses earlier than Tianjin, but records pertaining to their operations were scarce). The daily operation of public slaughterhouses and meat safety laws in Tianjin evinced striking continuity despite regime changes in the Republican era; characterizing the meat safety regulations of Tianjin between 1918 and 1949 within a single investigation is relatively uncomplicated.Footnote 3
This study argues that the failure to regulate meat safety in Tianjin reflects the gap between the modernization of government agencies and governmentality in Republican China. I invoke the Foucauldian concept of “governmentality” to refer to the maintenance of social orders with rationality (knowledge, techniques, et cetera), rather than abuse of punitive power.Footnote 4 My adoption of Rogaski’s “hygienic modernity” indicates the process of modernization through the improvement of public health.Footnote 5 Public slaughterhouses that conducted mandatory meat inspections represented a modern managerial system. Those in Tianjin were also responsible for levying the slaughter tax. Lacking training in both food safety and the ethicality of public servants, slaughterhouse officials prioritized enriching themselves over ensuring meat safety. Public abattoirs became a modern facade for traditional predatory taxing agencies.
Historical studies of public abattoirs primarily focus on four aspects: urban planning symbolized by logically situated and compartmentalized abattoirs, industrialized meat processing, clashes over meat trade among multiple stakeholders, and, what this article discusses, the elimination of the unsanitary and ghastly scenes in butcheries like those depicted in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.Footnote 6 Dorothee Brantz argues that the late nineteenth-century Berliners’ fear of zoonotic diseases, particularly trichinosis, drove local authorities to open slaughterhouses tasked with mandatory inspections.Footnote 7 Keir Waddington and Richard Perren show that the primary momentum for strict meat inspection was bovine tuberculosis in contemporary Britain; however, compulsory inspections and the establishment of public abattoirs did not proceed as smoothly as they did in Germany because of consumers’ limited understanding of the disease, business interests, and the practicality of enforcing inspections.Footnote 8
Investigating the role of public abattoirs, this study joins the discussion about China’s institutionalization of public health management in the early twentieth century. Rogaski argues that the contemporary awakening and modernization projects of Chinese people were inevitably associated with the term “hygiene” (weisheng 衛生). They adopted a medicalized view of national crises and integrated public and private health into their perception of modernity.Footnote 9 While Rogaski discusses the impact of imperialist invasion on weisheng, Nakajima Chieko and Nicole Barnes probe ordinary people’s internalization of hygienic concepts and acceptance of interventionist sanitary policies.Footnote 10 Chinese scholars, assimilating the concept of Iijima Wataru,Footnote 11 trace the evolution of China’s public health agencies amid its rationalization of urban management since the late Qing period and evaluate their effectiveness in epidemic prevention. However, their monographs pay limited attention to food safety.Footnote 12
Some Chinese scholars mention the rationale for launching public slaughterhouses. For instance, Lu Caixia and Wu Xiaoyu elaborate on the clash between traditional Chinese medical theories and modern veterinary knowledge. The triumph of the latter led to the application of science to meat inspections, which rationalized the introduction of public slaughterhouses staffed by professional veterinarians.Footnote 13 However, researchers are less interested in slaughterhouses’ actual operations than in the confrontations between city authorities and butchers who were unaccustomed to the interventionist hygiene regulations.Footnote 14
A study of slaughterhouses also complements the historiography of the Chinese livestock industry. Thomas DuBois concisely reviews Republican China’s meat processing and consumption.Footnote 15 Zhu Guannan discusses the state-promoted veterinarian studies in enhancing livestock breeding in Jiangsu Province.Footnote 16 Extant studies concentrate on Chinese egg powder and pig bristle, internationally popular commodities owing to their military value; most scholars contend that the lack of state support for indigenous enterprises of these products rendered them vulnerable in global markets.Footnote 17 Chang Ning argues that their survival relied on their integration of Western managerial techniques into traditional social networks.Footnote 18
The failure of Tianjin public abattoirs in ensuring meat safety must be contextualized within the dysfunctional governmentality of the Republican regime. Du Lihong concludes that strict science-directed inspection tended to force the majority of food vendors out of business. These vendors’ fierce resistance forced city officials to sacrifice food safety for social stability.Footnote 19 However, Lloyd Eastman shows that the officials running the regime habitually disregarded societal welfare, without outside power monitoring their accountability.Footnote 20 Prasenjit Duara argues that since the late Qing era, “entrepreneurial” brokerage had been essential for local authorities to perform their administrative functions; the brokers were functionaries who directly interacted with and exerted the state’s power over ordinary people. Their motivation to assume this onerous job was entrepreneurial, to maximize the returns from their positions with power rent-seeking practices. To cover its skyrocketing expenditures, the Republican regime attempted to replace these brokers with professional bureaucrats and thus to mitigate “state involution” – a situation in which predatory brokers accrued much more than the state could earn by levying new taxes. The state failed to monitor its corrupt bureaucrats, and ironically, they became new entrepreneurial brokers. When state power entered new social niches, so did these bureaucratized brokers.Footnote 21 Frederic Wakeman, in his study of Shanghai, contends that police agencies in the 1930s, which technically followed modern rational procedures, closely resembled traditional bureaucracy in daily operations, and poor division of labor undermined their efficiency.Footnote 22 This study shows that public abattoirs suffered from the same problem.
Necessity of public slaughterhouses in Republican China
By the early twentieth century, ordinary Chinese people had demonstrated concerns over meat safety based on their empirical perception of bad food. Butchers in Shanghai, without modern veterinarian knowledge, rejected hogs showing signs of illness (being inactive).Footnote 23 In 1913, the Municipal Council of the British Concession in Tianjin deemed a public abattoir possibly unnecessary and commented, “The Chinese are clever enough traders to know that bad meat is quickly detected and nearly impossible to sell.” British officials found that Chinese consumers tended to cook meat thoroughly before serving, which eliminated “most of” its threat to health.Footnote 24 Impoverished consumers, though they knowingly purchased low-priced, stale meat to satisfy their nutritional needs, heated the meat extensively to reduce the risk.Footnote 25
Chinese consumers’ methods of determining meat safety in the early twentieth century differed little from those used by Confucius 2000 years earlier. Stale fish or flesh should not be consumed, nor should people eat any food that was discolored or emitting foul smells (The Analects 論語, X.9). Even in a 1948 handbook, the author defined dangerous meat by its greenish colors or surface fluorescence. Foul odors from meat were also spoilage indicators.Footnote 26 However, these criteria were insufficient to guarantee meat safety. An article from Hygiene for the Mass (Dazhong weisheng 大衆衛生) noted that bright red-colored meat might come from hogs suffering from erysipelas.Footnote 27 Retailers also added dyes and spices to rotting meat to fool consumers.Footnote 28 Some butchers, as the proverb “hanging sheep heads but selling dog meat” (guayangtou maigourou 挂羊头卖狗肉) literally derides, mixed pathogen-ridden meat from street dogs and cats into pork. Only serological tests can detect such blatant adulteration.Footnote 29
The arrival of modern medical theories gradually redefined safe meat, at least in the minds of intellectuals. As the causal relationship between bacteria and spoiled meat became recognized in China in the early 1900sFootnote 30 , microbiological concepts were routinely cited in discussions of hygienic meat. In 1919, a journal intended for limitedly educated people explained the dangers of bovine tuberculosis and pork parasites, suggesting consumers heat everything thoroughly for sterilization.Footnote 31 Household handbooks also included warnings about ptomaine and botulinum toxins produced by bacteria in food.Footnote 32 Consumers could not easily detect such lurking danger until the concentration of parasites, bacteria, or toxins reached an extremely high level. Regular stir-frying or stewing of meat might not have reached the duration and temperature required to eliminate all pathogens, and extensive heating rendered meat unpalatable. Nutritionists even advocated for the renunciation of meat-eating despite its perceived connection with powerful Western nations.Footnote 33
Therefore, once it assumed responsibilities for people’s health, the state was compelled to intervene in the meat trade. In traditional Chinese societies, the state criminalized continuing to sell meat that had already sickened consumers but could not interdict unhealthy meat before it entered markets. Veterinarian-staffed public slaughterhouses inaugurated a new mode of meat safety regulation in China. A public abattoir was first proposed in 1867, when the British concession of Shanghai was improving sanitation in an area fouled by blood and carcasses from Chinese butcheries.Footnote 34 Unlike nineteenth-century European urban planners, meat hygiene was the primary concern for early twentieth-century Chinese officials. Germ theory had replaced the miasma theory of diseases, and butcheries’ unpleasant surroundings were less threatening than meat-borne bacteria. The Tianjin Bureau of Health introduced possibly the earliest motion (no later than 1907) for a public abattoir run by Chinese authorities. Inheriting health principles from the occupation forces during the Boxer Rebellion, this bureau’s first sanitation law stated that “foreign countries had established abattoirs for antemortem inspection of animals; only healthy animals were allowed to slaughter, and their carcass must be stamped so that diseased animals would not be secretly butchered.”Footnote 35 In 1922, an article in a popular journal argued that while China had hospitals for epidemic prevention and street-cleaning teams for urban sanitation, few agencies existed for meat inspection. When explaining public abattoirs’ advantages, the author mentioned parasites, bacteria, and adulteration, but not sanitation.Footnote 36 To convince consumers of the benefits of public slaughterhouses, science-popularizing journals occasionally publicized details of their operations, particularly the steps to detect unsafe meat.
Foreigners’ pressure also prompted city officials to recognize the value of public abattoirs, who strived to guarantee the proceedings from the export of sausages and cured pork. Foreign authorities sporadically confiscated uninspected meat for hygienic reasons. An article reviewing Guangzhou’s slaughterhouses first described European bans on US-processed meat between 1881 and 1893 due to trichinosis and tuberculosis, highlighting the associated 100-million-dollar loss. The initiation of mandatory meat inspection in the United States by public abattoirs ended the bans. The article argued that Western countries had rejected Chinese meat products since 1926, and the loss of revenue persuaded Guangzhou to establish its first veterinarian-staffed abattoir in 1929.Footnote 37 Since Tianjin was also an international trade hub, local officials must have had similar incentives to ensure meat quality with public abattoirs.
Tax collection was another rationale for governments to run public abattoirs. Provincial governments in China began to levy a slaughter tax (for the commodification of animal carcasses) in the late nineteenth century to finance their social modernization projects. In 1915, the Republican government institutionalized the slaughter tax nationally.Footnote 38 Contemporary taxes were usually collected by predatory tax-farmers. When the Republican regime expanded its list of taxable activities to increase its revenue, it also strived to bureaucratize tax collectors and secure direct control of levied taxes, thus minimizing state involution. It was impractical for collectors to visit hundreds of private butcheries within their vast jurisdiction every day. Since public abattoirs would become the only sites where animals could be legally butchered, officials could easily trace and tax all incoming animals. Initially, tax collectors were stationed in abattoirs for convenience, but they later dominated the operation of these public health facilities.
Establishing slaughterhouses in Tianjin
Like in other treaty ports, the public health agencies in Tianjin’s foreign concessions preceded their Chinese equivalents. During a meeting of the Tianjin Provisional Government (civil administration by foreign forces during the Boxer Rebellion) on September 4, 1901, a Japanese official recommended establishing several public slaughterhouses monitored by veterinarians to inspect all meat to be sold in Tianjin. The provisional government vetoed this proposal, reasoning that anything that could potentially monopolize the sale of specific commodities was unacceptable.Footnote 39 However, beginning in 1902, French, British, German, and Japanese concessions launched slaughterhouses for a safe meat supply within their respective barracks.Footnote 40
As mentioned above, the Chinese authorities in Tianjin also moved to build public abattoirs after recognizing their success in ensuring food safety. In September 1907, Tianjin officials proposed abattoirs that would inspect and tax all pork, beef, and mutton entering the city. The plan never got past conceptualization because multiple municipal agencies vied for the right to collect (and embezzle) the slaughter tax.Footnote 41 In April 1913, the Tianjin Police Bureau (having annexed the health bureau in 1912) again intended to establish a public slaughterhouse. By November, the abattoir’s operating procedure had reached the municipal government, and in April 1914, the bureau acquired land for it. While meat traders did not object to its establishment, they sought the privilege of running the facility, which the police bureau adamantly defended to control tax income directly and exclusively.Footnote 42 The slaughterhouse was to butcher hogs, cattle, and sheep together; consequently, the city’s Muslim population reinforced the retailers and frustrated the police bureau’s project.Footnote 43
An inflow of dangerous meat in 1917 prompted the city to open its slaughterhouses. In the summer of 1917, a severe flood hit Tianjin; the meat from drowned animals posed a severe threat to the survivors.Footnote 44 That winter, animal epidemics erupted in nearby provinces. The flow of unhygienic meat into Tianjin further alerted health authorities and consumers, raising calls for a thorough ban on meat importationFootnote 45 , which was unfeasible for a city of over half a million residents; establishing abattoirs that would allow only meat that had passed inspection to enter markets was a more practical solution. The Tianjin authorities had learned from Beijing, where a government-sponsored public abattoir opened in 1906 and only lasted one year (never revived by 1937), that abattoirs run by meat dealers were ineffective in ensuring meat quality; therefore, they insisted on retaining exclusive control of the proposed slaughterhouses.Footnote 46 In 1913 and 1917, Tianjin officials traveled to Shenyang and Yingkou – their Chinese-directed facilities had been in smooth operation for years, though under Japanese interference – for examples of modern abattoirs. Possibly owing to this Japanese intervention, Tianjin officials contended that few could be copied from these cities’ slaughterhouses; they were to launch public abattoirs from scratch.Footnote 47
To forestall opposition from meat retailers, the municipal government adopted a carrot-and-stick approach. Two abattoirs were planned simultaneously, one just for butchering hogs to avoid offending the Muslim population.Footnote 48 The authorities promised free lodging for animal owners waiting for their animals to be butchered, free treatment of animals that failed safety inspection, and return of animal viscera (popular food) to animal owners. When animals were processed in private butcheries, the butchers retained the viscera.Footnote 49 Concurrently, the city allocated a special fund to acquire animals to be sold to consumers should meat traders go on strike. Besides depriving the traders of consumers’ support, officials threatened to arrest strike mobilizers and revoke strikers’ business licenses for life.Footnote 50 On April 1, 1918, Tianjin’s public abattoirs became operational. They accepted hogs, cattle, and sheep and, in 1919, also monopolized the slaughter of horses, donkeys, and mules. Whether an animal could enter the market was completely at the mercy of abattoir staff; a lucrative power rent-seeking opportunity emerged.
By the end of 1921, six official slaughterhouses had been established. The organization of these slaughterhouses became stable in the early 1930s. According to a law passed in January 1932, the headquarters of the slaughterhouses contained seven branches; the most important branches were anti-smuggling (taxation), veterinary (treating animal diseases), and inspection (of animals, employees, and vendors). Butchering was carried out in each public abattoir: the first, second, and fifth handled hogs; the third and fourth processed halal meat; and the sixth provided meat for foreign consumers. However, each abattoir had merely one professional veterinarian, an untrained assistant, a few clerks and laborers, and tax collectors.Footnote 51 During WWII, the Japanese authorities argued that these six abattoirs were in disrepair and planned to concentrate them in a central complex with Japan-made equipment to convey the superiority of Japanese rule.Footnote 52 The city broke ground for the central slaughterhouse in 1942, which would monopolize all steps from animal procurement from rural areas to the meat market (or refrigerated storage) and be staffed by a much larger veterinarian team.Footnote 53 However, this project never materialized.
Challenges to the public abattoirs’ meat monopoly persisted, but they were short-lived. For instance, in May 1929, five pork dealers appealed to the city government to build a stall to accommodate all hogs shipped to Tianjin. The dealers promised to prepare hogs for butchering in adherence to the city’s requirements. Their requests were rejected, showing the city’s volition to prevent any unofficial power from encroaching on this privilege.Footnote 54 In September 1932, because of budgetary issues, the city allowed a meat dealer to build a stall that would butcher all the hogs for Tianjin; the stall owner was given the prerogative as a tax-farmer.Footnote 55 Widespread resistance led this stall to cease functioning after several months, and the city rejected similar subsequent requests.Footnote 56 The city only had dozens of non-monopolizing hog stalls that fed incoming animals and helped animal owners handle taxation paperwork with public slaughterhouses.
The public abattoirs of Tianjin also acquired the sole power of levying the slaughter tax. In 1919, two legislators in Tianjin introduced a bill requesting that the police bureau, which ran the public abattoirs, collect the slaughter tax to mitigate tax-farmers’ exploitation of pig raisers.Footnote 57 While the bill was retracted before voting, the tax-farming system moved toward disintegration because of the ever-rising annual tax quota that the municipality imposed on tax-farmers, which severely undermined their profit margins, as the quota approached the maximum amount they could extract from taxpayers. In 1925, Tianjin entitled public slaughterhouses to collect the slaughter tax.Footnote 58 The public slaughterhouses, however, also struggled to achieve the quota, which had skyrocketed, likely as a scheme to evict tax-farmers from meat transactions. In later years, the city repeatedly contemplated returning this power to tax-farmers to save expenses on hiring tax collectors, but all plans were frustrated because tax-farmers hesitated to accept the unaffordable tax quota. The slaughter tax accounted for such a large portion of its revenue (more than 8% in 1929) that any delay in collection was intolerable.Footnote 59 Tianjin people also remained vigilant and resisted the reappearance of tax-farmers, as shown by the aforementioned hostility at the stall owner who attempted to control all hogs in Tianjin.
Regulation of meat hygiene in Tianjin
As consistently highlighted in their propaganda, Tianjin’s public abattoirs were responsible for detecting and destroying unsafe meat. According to their first publicized operating procedures introduced in 1921, diseased animals that endangered consumers’ health should not be butchered; instead, they were branded with the character “forbidden” (jin du 禁) and quarantined or treated in the abattoirs until veterinarians declared them recovered. Those with less-threatening diseases might be slaughtered, but only in a chamber remote from the workshops processing healthy animals. Once transmissible diseases were detected in an animal’s carcass, the whole carcass had to be buried or incinerated; all equipment involved in the diagnosis required strict sterilization. If noninfectious diseases were found, only the affected parts of the carcass were excised. Butchers who contracted syphilis, tuberculosis, or dermatosis were immediately suspended from work.Footnote 60
No guidelines existed for the construction of public slaughterhouses until 1928. That year, the central government’s health ministry issued a series of food hygiene laws, including two pertaining to abattoirs. A slaughterhouse was required to have access to fresh water and sewage systems and not be located within 500 meters of schools, hospitals, parks, or water supplies. Each facility’s interior should remain invisible to residents nearby and have separate compartments for live animals, quarantined animals, butchering, inspection, meat storage, viscera and hide processing, waste disposal, disinfection, et cetera. All rooms must be separated by watertight materials to avoid cross-contamination. Chemicals and equipment for meat inspection, like microscopes, serological test kits, surgical tools, and disinfectants, should always be available.Footnote 61 The compartmentalization of the Tianjin public abattoirs overall complied with the 1928 laws, though they were not connected with the municipal water pipelines.Footnote 62 According to employees from slaughterhouse no. 1, most buildings survived until 1949, with the exception of inspection laboratories, indicating the city’s dearth of attention to meat safety.Footnote 63
The 1928 laws also criminalized any challenge to the official monopoly over meat supply and inspection. They demanded mandatory meat inspection by veterinarians in slaughterhouses nationwide. All urban jurisdictions were required to establish public abattoirs within two years. Once the official abattoirs became functional, private ones would be shut down even if they met their official counterparts’ hygienic and technical requirements.Footnote 64
The rationale for this monopoly was that the public slaughterhouses run by the authorities would operate with advanced veterinarian techniques and maintain high sanitary standards, which traditional private butcheries could hardly achieve; however, the public abattoirs in Tianjin failed to meet such expectations. According to a narrative in 1928, because of the numerous animals processed daily, the sole veterinarian in each facility examined each animal in seconds with naked eyes; only animals showing obvious signs of illness underwent pathological tests. Most butchers were unskilled laborers temporarily hired by the abattoirs with meager food. They bludgeoned animals without pacifying them first and lacerated the stunned animals’ throats for bleeding. After dehairing animal carcasses with boiled water, butchers used their mouths to blow air into a hole cut on an animal’s rear foot to separate hide and muscle, a step to facilitate deskinning that was notoriously unsanitary for the meat and the butchers. The carcass was skinned and eviscerated before its postmortem examination, which was conducted in a similarly hasty manner. Inspectors finally stamped the carcass to prove its safety and taxation.Footnote 65
Memoirs pertaining to public slaughterhouse no. 1 during the Japanese occupation and the Civil War demonstrated that these butchering methods persisted. In both periods, pig owners no longer delivered animals directly to this abattoir, but to one of several hog stalls surrounding it. The managers of the stalls helped finish taxation paperwork and set butchering schedules with the slaughterhouse. While butchering should be carried out within the abattoir, stall employees were responsible for butchering their own pigs. Besides tax collection and safety inspection, the staff of this slaughterhouse only maintained orders in the facility and offered boiled water for dehairing hogs.Footnote 66 Stall workers sometimes mentioned stray dogs scavenging on the animal viscera haphazardly thrown onto the facility’s ground and direct disposal of blood-contaminated water in nearby residential areas.Footnote 67
During the Japanese occupation, Tianjin faced its most comprehensive meat safety laws. As Rogaski shows, this period represented “the culmination of government-administered weisheng” in Tianjin.Footnote 68 Veterinarians in Tianjin were much more concerned about animal epidemics than in the years before 1937 or after 1945; precautionary vaccinations are prevalent in archival records. A distinctive feature of the wartime regulations pertaining to public slaughterhouses was their attention to employees’ threats to meat, owing to the colonial medicine norms that primarily wielded power over the bodies of the colonized.Footnote 69 Their corporeal bodies (including the animals’) were presumed to be pathogen-laden, and the consistent intervention into their lives based on biomedical knowledge evinced the colonizers’ hegemony. All butchers had to be registered in abattoirs and carry physicians’ certificates before working. Besides being free from dermatosis and other contagious diseases, they should possess normal intelligence and mental status. Butchers should wear white uniforms and regularly clean their butchering tools, which were subject to daily inspection. Smoking, spitting, shouting, and disposing of waste outside designated areas were prohibited.Footnote 70 Wartime laws remained effective until 1949; however, like all other contemporary weisheng policies, their enforcement was haphazard even during Japanese occupation. No memoir from this period mentions such hygienic requirements for stall employees who butchered animals; the wartime butchering methods remained unhygienic.
Public abattoirs also specified which diseases caused an animal to fail inspection. The criteria of the 1920s are unavailable, but veterinarians possibly only rejected hogs that were dead or extremely frail when shipped to their facilities, since they performed inspection with their naked eyes. In a 1935 guideline, the main criterion for deciding how much meat to discard was whether the disease was localized to a specific body part or affected the whole carcass. This guideline cited septicemia as an example that required destroying the entire carcass because bacterial infection of the blood carries pathogens across the whole body. It also listed examples that required the removal of only infected areas, including the commonly seen trichinosis. Abattoir staff were required to record the number of animals failing inspection, with reasons and disposal methods.Footnote 71
Wartime regulations featured more details for determining meat safety, because of the mode of colonial medicine and procurement of local meat by Japanese forces. Antemortem inspections were to begin only after animals had rested in the abattoir for more than an hour so that their long-distance transportation would not affect the results. Veterinarians checked an animal’s nutritional status, hide, lymph nodes, hooves, respiration rate, and body temperature before greenlighting its slaughter. Postmortem inspections examined animal blood, major organs, muscles, and tongues. These regulations specified more diseases requiring immediate disposal of the whole animal, including septicemia, tetanus, severe jaundice, severe ulceration, tuberculosis, and trichinosis. Carcasses contaminated by deadly toxins met the same fate. When epidemics broke out, all animals found or suspected of being infected were totally destroyed.Footnote 72
On most occasions, only affected organs and flesh were destroyed. Veterinarian records in 1945 indicate that approximately thirty diseases that affected animals’ muscle, lungs, liver, heart, and intestines and necessitated partial or full destruction of animal carcass per the wartime regulations were detected. Among them, only trichinosis required the destruction of the entire animal; however, fewer than five cases were found among the over one thousand animals that failed inspections per month. Incomplete bleeding, due to poor butcher training, was another common reason for incinerating a whole animal because the remaining blood was a hotbed for pathogens.Footnote 73 Butchers of the late 1940s recounted that only three types of diseases required destroying meat: trichinosis, erysipelas, and pansteatitis. When symptoms were not severe, meat from sick animals (with the affected sections removed) was still sold to consumers after extensive heating.Footnote 74 After 1945, the municipal government evidently loosened regulations on meat safety. The major meat consumers were no longer Japanese soldiers, but Tianjin residents suffering from hyperinflation. When food supply to the city became unreliable due to the Civil War, this practice maximized meat provision to stabilize markets.
Salvaging as much value as possible from animals supposed to be destroyed was officially endorsed, because confiscating too much of this lucrative commodity would encourage animal owners to revert to smuggling. Since 1919, animal owners had been allowed to retain usable parts of animals that failed inspections.Footnote 75 The 1935 guideline suggested that animal horns, hooves, bones, and hide could be used for industrial purposes even when the whole carcass had to be incinerated for hygienic reasons.Footnote 76 The wartime laws specified that carcasses unsuitable for consumption should be heated above 100 degrees Celsius for more than one hour and then converted into fertilizer. Hide and bones were to be recycled to support Japanese war efforts. Animals with serious contagious diseases like plague, anthrax, and glanders, however, should be thoroughly destroyed.Footnote 77 The occupation force strove to economize resources but could not risk its soldiers’ health. It was particularly interested in salvaging grease from animal fat and opened refineries to lubricate Japanese war machinery.Footnote 78
Meat markets were also subject to several types of sanitary inspections. In 1929, the Ministry of Health recommended that meat be stored in ice-cooled containers with a proper cover before being sold to customers, with a maximum shelf life of two days, after which it must be cooked or salted.Footnote 79 Public health officials in Tianjin occasionally arrested meat vendors who sold unhygienic meat, although officials generally reacted only to consumers’ complaints about the disgusting conditions of vendors’ stalls. According to a municipal order on May 30, 1936, the city government received a report that a man called Li “the Big” was selling pork in front of an abandoned temple. The meat was dirt-covered, discolored, and attracting swarms of flies; it had been kept unrefrigerated for days. The report’s author accused policemen and sanitation inspectors of defaulting on their duties because twice in earlier years, he had urged them to shut down such unhygienic stalls. Municipal authorities instructed public health officials to act immediately.Footnote 80 Officers also inspected markets and fined retailers who failed to cover their meat containers; in summer, their inspections became more comprehensive. In June 1942, each police district dispatched an officer and a slaughterhouse veterinarian to inspect all meat shops within their jurisdictions in ten days. The inspection covered shop sanitation, business licenses, iced containers, meat quality, and sales records (to detect smuggling).Footnote 81 Further, the city required retailers to renew their business registration at specific intervals; the renewal was contingent upon their shops’ sanitation and the ownership of cooled containers.Footnote 82
Keeping meat fresh during its delivery to retailers was also critical. The meat was delivered using human-powered carts; the vast area of Tianjin meant that some meat would reach vendors after hours of transportation. Carts were either uncovered or hermetically sealed; the former allowed dirt to contaminate the meat, and the latter caused the accumulation of heat in carts, accelerating meat spoilage.Footnote 83 Retailers and customers knew that rigor mortis generated heat, which could be resolved by chilling meat for several hours before transporting it out of the abattoirs. However, Tianjin abattoirs did not have functional refrigerating apparatuses.Footnote 84 These slaughterhouses tried to reduce spoilage by regularly adjusting their operational schedules. Animals were usually butchered in the morning and shipped out at approximately 2 pm. Retailers transported meat in the hot afternoon and sometimes did not sell it until the following day, compromising meat quality. In summer, butchering was moved to the evening, so postmortem examination and transportation occurred at cooler temperatures.Footnote 85
The slaughterhouses’ monopoly over the meat supply finally demanded the elimination of uninspected meat from markets. Even before public abattoirs were established, police officers patrolled the streets and seized animals that died from diseases.Footnote 86 Since 1918, city officials had been determined to apprehend meat smugglers. The public abattoirs accepted only live animals, and municipal authorities banned shipping butchered animals into the city because ascertaining whether they had undergone inspections was impossible.Footnote 87 More importantly, in rural areas, where inspection by public slaughterhouses had yet to be mandated, slaughtering animals would not generate income for Tianjin slaughterhouse officials. However, this ban was not consistently enforceable when the meat supply was unreliable. On these occasions, abattoirs sent veterinarians and tax officials to checkpoints at major entrances of the city to examine incoming meat.Footnote 88
Heavy fines were the primary means to deter smugglers. Perpetrators must pay tax and a fine, usually twenty times the inspection fee. The fine was tripled if they were caught destroying evidence or fabricating stamps, as well as for recidivism.Footnote 89 The fine was devastating to those who depended on the meager smuggling profit to feed themselves. For instance, on December 7, 1940, a man called Zhang Qingyu was apprehended for transporting twenty kilograms of beef and lamb. He admitted his awareness of anti-smuggling laws, but poverty forced him to profit from selling untaxed meat procured in rural areas. The meat, which was confiscated, cost him forty-nine yuan; he also paid tax and a fine of thirty yuan. His loss exceeded the two-month salary of an automobile driver, who earned much more than Zhang, a bicycle-taxi driver.Footnote 90
The failure and unpopularity of public slaughterhouses
When government-operated public slaughterhouses were introduced into China, animal owners, retailers, and consumers fiercely resisted this official monopoly since it rendered meat transactions more complicated and expensive (tax and inspection fees), which forced the closure of public slaughterhouses in some cities. Tianjin, however, managed to establish and maintain public abattoirs. Per Locke’s social contract concept, “everyone who enjoys his share of the protection, should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it.”Footnote 91 Consumers might have tolerated the extra cost had these public abattoirs ensured meat safety. Meat safety in Tianjin during the Republican era, however, was far from satisfactory.
Admittedly, no public health agency could guarantee the total elimination of unhealthy meat. The public slaughterhouse in Hong Kong managed to remove private butchers and insalubrious meat vendors from the streets, but the British authorities persistently suffered a shortage of inspectors to enforce food hygiene laws around the clock.Footnote 92 The professional veterinarians and advanced equipment in the German abattoir in Qingdao were an exemplar of modern abattoirs in early twentieth-century China, but unhygienic meat still appeared in Chinese consumers’ markets. The German authorities found that local Chinese residents surreptitiously unearthed the meat that was supposed to be burned and buried by Chinese police.Footnote 93 However, such cases remained rare. Public abattoirs in Hong Kong and Qingdao at least guaranteed the food safety of local foreigners’ neighborhoods.
The public slaughterhouses of Tianjin, ironically, sometimes became a public nuisance. In 1925, a journalist published a piece of consumers’ sarcasm: if one found fresh meat at the market, they should instantly call the police because the meat must have been smuggled into the city, which suggested severe meat spoilage during transportation, because most abattoirs were too far away from authorized meat markets.Footnote 94 Long delays in tax collection and postmortem inspection at noon were contributing factors. The sanitation of the public abattoirs was also notorious. In June 1947, the Tianjin Native City Waterworks Company complained that slaughterhouse no. 3 washed animal intestines close to its water source, threatening the city residents’ water supply.Footnote 95 Animal vendors even lamented having to hire butchers to process the animals illegally, as the filthy interior of public slaughterhouses contaminated animals’ carcasses, and such meat would fail the postmortem inspection and be confiscated without compensation.Footnote 96
The municipality also failed to stem the flow of uninspected meat into the city. During WWII, the Japanese authorities imposed draconian anti-smuggling regulations, and city officials strove to crack down on smuggling, evidenced by the frequent meat smuggling cases in the police bureau’s interrogation records. However, flotillas of bicycles carrying uninspected meat remained on the city’s streets.Footnote 97 The municipal government was more helpless in apprehending smugglers after 1945. In January 1948, floods of uninspected (thus lower-priced) meat repeatedly hit Tianjin, almost knocking law-abiding meat retailers out of business.Footnote 98
The failure of Tianjin’s public slaughterhouses as public health agencies should be attributed to their beneficiaries and employees, as well as the municipal government. Civil societies cooperate closely with governments and markets in modern countries to ensure effective governance and public welfare;Footnote 99 customers complement the authorities’ enforcement of hygiene laws by rejecting unsafe meat. This requires customers to acquire fundamentals of modern food safety notions, which, in countries like Britain, have promoted food safety legislation.Footnote 100 However, in early twentieth-century China, food safety laws were literally copied from Japan and imposed on the population. Hygiene education in Tianjin was in its infancy.Footnote 101 While ordinary consumers could refuse discolored, foul-smelling meat, bacteria or toxins were beyond their comprehension. When most people struggled to acquire affordable food, banning apparently fresh meat merely for lack of inspection stamps lacked popular support, and consumers still welcomed cheaper, uninspected meat.
Officials’ unethical behavior generated most of the negative attitudes toward public abattoirs. Modern governments became legitimate when they protected the well-being of the governed through established laws and impartial enforcement, and people were less likely to doubt the curtailing of liberties when the social benefit was clear.Footnote 102 However, as Eastman shows, since the late Qing period, governing power for Chinese officials meant self-serving prerogatives rather than social commitment.Footnote 103 A newspaper satirically noted that the more public health inspectors Tianjin trained, the more robberies occurred in restaurants in the name of food safety.Footnote 104 Public slaughterhouses were more convenient tools for corrupt officials, since they held the power of both taxation and safety inspection. Animal owners and retailers frequently complained of being apprehended by officials and accused of smuggling; however, bribes secured their release without proof of taxation and safety inspection. While slaughterhouse directors accused impersonators of their staff members of such crimes, they also suspected their subordinates’ involvement in such crimes and interrogated them.Footnote 105 This misconduct could be traced to laws punishing smugglers. For example, 40% of the fines imposed on smugglers were awarded to the people arresting them; 10% covered the abattoirs’ operating costs. Employees’ promotions also depended on the number of smuggling cases resolved.Footnote 106 Thus, abattoir officials were eager to charge as many people as possible with smuggling unless their victims offered more bribes than their authorized rewards. Before 1928, the police bureau collected several thousand yuan annually in the name of voluntary donation from animal owners; otherwise, their animals had to be sold to a company closely tied to the bureau before being legally butchered.Footnote 107
Safety inspection was also a power rent-seeking opportunity. Veterinarians held the stamp of meat safety; the number of animals that could be butchered promptly and the amount of meat that passed postmortem inspections depended on the sum of bribes from animal owners.Footnote 108 The veterinarian of slaughterhouse no. 6 once acquired 50,000 yuan from the municipal treasury to furnish a refrigerated room, though the actual cost was less than 10,000 yuan, and the refrigerators were hardly operational.Footnote 109 Official proof of safe meat was even purchasable. In March 1941, a man called An Guotian was arrested for smuggling beef. He had purchased beef from an illegal butchery, and the butcher sent him an authentic proof of inspection that he claimed to have obtained (likely bought) from public slaughterhouse no. 3.Footnote 110 In May 1947, residents of central Tianjin complained the intolerable smell at a horse butchery that was astonishingly close to a police station; its manager paid 50,000 yuan per horse (owing to inflation) to the station’s chief. All officers turned a blind eye to this illicit business.Footnote 111
The capacity of the Tianjin public slaughterhouses to guarantee meat safety would have been questionable even if the corrupt officials had been replaced by those observing public officials’ moral codes. In the Republican era, city administrators had yet to acknowledge that public health was an indispensable governmental responsibility. The Tianjin government frequently victimized its health bureau to economize its expenditure. Police forces assimilated the bureau in 1912. It was revived in 1928 but subsequently merged with other agencies until its reestablishment in the 1940s. Its trajectory indicated the low priority of health affairs in Tianjin. In 1930, public health received only 3.1% of this city’s budget, a ratio well behind other major Chinese cities.Footnote 112
The food safety-related operations of public abattoirs were accordingly underequipped. It was not until June 1921, three years after the first facility was launched, that the police bureau began allocating money to acquire equipment for dissecting animals and identifying pathogens.Footnote 113 City residents satirized the absence of a microscope in an agency tasked with detecting epidemics.Footnote 114 A property inventory compiled in 1938 indicated that all abattoirs lacked microscopes and adequate medical instruments to diagnose zoonotic diseases.Footnote 115 Under Japanese rule, slaughterhouses acquired microscopes, but postwar reports demonstrate that basic reagents and equipment like alcohol, formaldehyde, and cylinders were scarce.Footnote 116
The public slaughterhouses also lacked qualified inspectors. In 1929, a health bureau official deemed the bureau’s veterinarians adequate to sustain the operation of only two abattoirs.Footnote 117 In response, the city offered rapid courses to train veterinarians to reinforce these facilities, but by November 1936, all such training had ceased.Footnote 118 Even in 1947, each public abattoir had only one veterinarian with almost no knowledge of animal epidemics.Footnote 119
The dysfunction of Tianjin’s public abattoirs and the public’s poor perception of them should be traced to the functions initially assigned to them. The municipal authorities failed to clearly divide labor within their administrative system and were unaccustomed to professionalized agencies led by technical experts, both being symbols of modern governments.Footnote 120 Tianjin operated slaughterhouses not only to ensure meat safety but also to generate revenue, and the latter gradually became prioritized. While the police bureau had assimilated the health bureau, the top police commanders were unconvinced of the need for public abattoirs for meat safety. They greenlighted powerful meat dealers to butcher hogs outside the abattoirs, provided that they donated sufficient money to the police bureau.Footnote 121 In the 1920s, the slaughterhouses’ proceedings funded local administration and, most importantly, police officers’ salaries (a standard practice in other cities).Footnote 122 Complying with their top commanders’ interests, the slaughterhouse managers undoubtedly prioritized tax collection and minimized expenditure on food safety. Observing their dysfunction, Jiao Xijing, a senior veterinarian responsible for preventing animal epidemics, derided these abattoirs as merely a redundant taxing agency and a source of wealth for corrupt officials.Footnote 123 These public slaughterhouses were transferred to the revived health bureau in 1928 to enhance their effectiveness.
The health bureau’s dissolution in 1931 meant the public abattoirs were again managed by non-experts in food safety. The slaughterhouses were placed under the taxation branch of the city’s treasury bureau,Footnote 124 indicating the primary role the city expected them to play. While the slaughterhouses returned to the sanitation section of the police bureau during Japanese occupation, the treasury bureau retained its taxation power and actively intervened in safety inspections.Footnote 125 The two bureaus were entangled in conflicts over the distribution of the slaughter tax and smugglers’ fines. The municipal government admitted in late 1946 that the duty of meat inspection should be transferred to professional veterinarians employed by the restored health bureau. However, the health bureau reasoned that so long as the treasury bureau controlled taxation, the slaughterhouses were unable to operate efficiently, as what had been when the police and the treasury bureaus shared their administration during WWII. Without full control of tax proceedings, the health bureau believed it could not renovate dilapidated laboratories and purchase adequate equipment.Footnote 126 In early 1947, the city government affirmed the treasury bureau’s exclusive control over the public abattoirs; the health bureau could merely send veterinarians to reinforce meat inspections.Footnote 127 The treasury bureau was undeniably more suitable for taxation and thus retained this lucrative agency.
The city’s means of handling confiscated meat further indicated its lack of concern for meat hygiene. In the 1930s, smugglers could sometimes retrieve their commodities after paying tax, fine, and inspection fees, but it was unclear if the meat had undergone inspection. A 1942 law mandated the seizure of all smuggled meat.Footnote 128 However, the final disposal of confiscated meat was absent from archival records. Abattoir managers sometimes surreptitiously shipped hogs that died of exhaustion or diseases to illegal vendors of cooked food.Footnote 129 In the fall of 1948, to stem hyperinflation, the state government temporarily froze market prices by administrative orders, prompting traders to smuggle as much meat as possible into black markets and sell it at a price that matched the actual inflation rate. The city was desperate to secure a meat supply for legal transactions. For example, on September 23, 1948, a person called Guan You, who was arrested for smuggling, confessed that he had resigned from a legal meat shop and acquired thirty-five kilograms of uninspected pork to resell. Instead of confiscating the pork, police officers coerced him to sell it instantly at the frozen price, without sending the meat for inspection.Footnote 130
Conclusion
Germ theory revolutionized the criteria for safe meat in China in the early twentieth century. Traditional approaches to determining meat quality became inadequate in revealing lethal threats lurking in meat. Therefore, the concept of public abattoirs was imported to ensure that all meat underwent rigorous inspections before entering the market. City authorities also moved to abolish the traditional tax-farming system, and public abattoirs were tasked with levying the slaughter tax. In terms of public health and revenue, these abattoirs symbolized China’s adoption of a Western-style modern governing system. Tianjin was one of the first cities to run government-owned public slaughterhouses to improve meat safety. However, the abattoirs differed little from traditional butcheries. From retailers’ and consumers’ perspectives, their establishment was merely the government’s newest strategy to extort money.
The failure of Tianjin’s public slaughterhouses evinced that the development of governing strategies in Republican Chinese cities fell behind the expansion of governmental agencies modeled on Western societies. Despite their decades of operation, Tianjin’s public abattoirs remained a façade of public health regulation. City officials ignored that the logical division of labor, which was fledging in China, was critical to operating modern governmental agencies efficiently. These abattoirs were responsible for both safety inspection and taxation, the latter of which was more critical for local governments that were desperate to fund their expanding bureaucracies. Consumers’ safety was sacrificed for revenue. These abattoirs had inadequate equipment and professional personnel for hygienic meat processing and safety inspection, because they were not indispensable to taxation. Furthermore, corrupt officials disregarded their identities as public servants and fattened their wallets through power rent-seeking. They were more interested in arresting and fining smugglers, some of whom were innocent, than targeting spoiled meat; embezzlement sometimes became preconditions for passing inspection. The moral stigma associated with corruption generated “popular cynicism toward and distrust of the government.”Footnote 131 The lack of improvement in meat safety further alienated public abattoirs from animal owners, retailers, and consumers, who faced taxes, inspection fees, and other expenditures per municipal edicts.
The situation in the first three decades in the People’s Republic of China differed entirely from that before 1949. Planned economy and food rationing meant that the majority of livestock was owned, inspected, and distributed by state agencies. While the “health versus starvation” choice still existed because of food insecurity, the dynamics among consumers, inspectors, and official suppliers deserve investigation from a different angle. With the disintegration of the planned economy in the 1980s, private animals and meat dealers reappeared, along with unsafe or adulterated meat. This circumstance revived the public abattoirs, though they are not necessarily government-owned, nor could any single facility monopolize an area’s meat supply (the slaughter tax had been abolished). However, the power rent-seeking practice remains: inspectors at state-certified abattoirs retain the power to greenlight the flow of meat into markets. It is worthwhile to probe the more complicated power struggles among animal owners (with modern veterinarian knowledge), abattoirs, mega meat-processing enterprises, and individual consumers.
Acknowledgements
I thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. All mistakes are mine.
Funding statement
This work was supported by the Tianjin Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Program: A Study of the Regulation of Food Safety in Modern Tianjin: 1900-1949 (No. TJZLQN22-022).
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Open access
