I believe that's not how economics works, it's like you can't just close your eyes to rocketing condo prices and expect evetything else to remain the same like salaries.
Every animal protein source will be driven to raise prices coz it's not like China could produce vastly more but refrained, arable land is not enough, it imports 30% of it's food, they just can't produce the cheap feed crops needed not to mention the amount.
It is only in the recent 15 years that the average people could afford to put meat in their daily dishes (and aboslutely not in the sense as Ameicans eat cheap meat as a staple), that's why Chinese dishes are so heavy in carbs and veggies and soy. To take that away from many is the difference of have and have not.
I agree. When I lived in China in 2002, meat wasn’t that rare, even in tier 88 cities I travelled to. The cafeterias in Beijing’s universities definitely had no problem finding it. Maybe in the 70s and early 80s?
The rate of urbanization in 2002 is 39.09%, note this includes small towns which are much poorer than cities, that means the majority of the population was still very poor and the trend to work in coastal factories barely began, so could you really see average people's daily dishes as a guest?
I'm not saying it's rare to eat pork, what I’m saying is eating pork almost everyday like it's a super normal thing, not just every now and then or even ocassionally. I don't doubt there were many people who can afford to tho it's 1.4 billion afterall.
In my mid-sized town eating pork was a treat back then, especially when there were guests or holidays, definitely not everyday, it was soy products, fish (near a big reservoir) and eggs, people's wages were 50 to 100 dollars, farmers were even poorer coz it was all susbsistence farming.
Do the math, pork was fluctuating around 1 dollar per 500g back then.
Yunnan is mountainous so it probably doesn't even qualify as susbsistence farming, but it's warm and has fruit industry and tourism now, you can still find extreme poverty in Guizhou's mountains which is right above Yunnan.
Leiyang is not a town in the American sense, it was a county now a city. Village → town → county → city → capital → province.
I don’t know what you would consider a small town like Leiyang Hunan (small being relative, it has a couple hundred thousand urban and almost a million rural). Of course, Hunan is a bit different from poorer Jiangxi or even Henan. Heck, when I visited the yunnan country side in 2002, I was told many families were so poor they only had one pair of pants (seemed like an exaggeration, but who knows).
In the 80's the Chinese navy was using warships to smuggle insanely profitable sedans, coastal cities have secret private workshops which was punishable by the law until 2009, students marched in Beijing to protest againt crony speculatiors including sons of party high officials, city population is 20% of the country, farmers need application and strickly controlled permits to work in cities. Even in the early 2000s farmers aka "blind migrants" were still being rounded up in Shenzhen and arrested.
Every animal protein source will be driven to raise prices coz it's not like China could produce vastly more but refrained, arable land is not enough, it imports 30% of it's food, they just can't produce the cheap feed crops needed not to mention the amount.
It is only in the recent 15 years that the average people could afford to put meat in their daily dishes (and aboslutely not in the sense as Ameicans eat cheap meat as a staple), that's why Chinese dishes are so heavy in carbs and veggies and soy. To take that away from many is the difference of have and have not.