Animal Welfare in China: Culture, Politics and Crisis
Peter J. Li 驳斥「中国文化不关心动物」的刻板印象——佛教、道教、儒学中有深厚的动物慈悲传统；真正驱动当代动物福利危机的是后社会主义发展型国家对经济增长和食品安全的追求。 Peter J. Li refutes the stereotype that Chinese 'culture' is to blame for animal abuses — Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions contain strong compassion toward animals. The real driver of modern animal welfare crises is the postsocialist state's pursuit of economic growth and food security.
Animal Welfare in China (Sydney UP, 2021) challenges the widespread tendency to blame Chinese “culture” and “traditions” for contemporary animal abuses. Li demonstrates that major Chinese philosophical and religious traditions actually contain robust ethics of compassion toward animals. Instead, the postsocialist developmental state’s pursuit of economic growth, efficiency, and food security — born from decades of severe poverty — is the primary driver of animal welfare crises in modern China. Many supposedly “traditional” practices are in fact quite recent developments driven by state-led industrialization.