Written By: Vivienne Vermaak
To many Westerners, the idea of a pet-friendly Chinese restaurant might conjure up a secret question: “Is the pet on a leash or on the menu?”
It might come as a surprise that Chinese people now own pets, not eat them. Over the last decade, pet ownership levels have increased by 50%. Twenty percent of Chinese families now have a dog or cat.
“This is a very serious and dangerous thing to China,” says Frans Cronje of The Common Sense news and analysis platform. “You can read a lot into the future of China and the US because of this. It is one of the most important insights into the Chinese state’s ability to maintain order. Pet ownership breeds individualism, individualism that creates ownership around an asset that has no economic value. This is threatening, which is why the Chinese state restricted it.”
A few decades ago, the Chinese state called pets a “bourgeois peculiarity”.
There are many ways to tell when a society has become bourgeois. You can look at the cars in the driveway or the coffee machines in the kitchen. Or you can look at whether the dog lies with you on the bed while you watch your favourite Netflix show.
The moment it gets its own pillow, its own doctor, and its own place on the couch, the dog has become the most economically successful member of the household.
This is not a story about a labrador or a poodle. It is a story about what happens when people acquire enough disposable income, private space, and personal autonomy to spend money on something that produces absolutely no measurable economic return.
This is economic development at its most wonderfully irrational, and China is discovering it at extraordinary speed.
We have a habit of describing China as a communist country and therefore, by implication, as having a communist economy. It is something more complicated, like a labradoodle.
China is politically communist, but economically, things are rather more convoluted. Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began in 1978, China has constructed a strange hybrid: state ownership and direction sitting alongside private enterprise, markets, foreign investment, international trade and an enormous consumer economy.
The Communist Party has retained political control while allowing markets to do much of the economic heavy lifting. The official description is the Orwellian-sounding “socialist market economy”.
So China has managed something unusual: a communist government and quite a lot of capitalism, surprisingly manifesting in its pet ownership patterns.
Humans have lived amongst animals for thousands of years and domesticated some. Ancient Egyptians kept cats. Roman elites kept exotic animals. Aristocrats throughout history surrounded themselves with horses, hounds, birds and other creatures.
To the peasant, the animal may produce eggs, milk, meat, labour or security. A dog guards the property, a cat catches mice, a chicken has a job.
The bourgeois dog, on the other hand, has one principal responsibility: to be loved.
Our fur babies have become legitimate members of our families. Spending on pets has skyrocketed. Furthermore, animal lovers organise politically. Powerful political lobbies argue that pets are people too.
This indicates a shift towards individuality and being able to choose what is important to you. You have a choice about what you spend your disposable income on, including something ridiculous like a unicorn hat for your cat.
You now have the freedom to form an emotional attachment to a creature that the state did not assign you. You can pick your family, in direct defiance of a government that once limited families to one human child per household.
This personal liberty might be the chink in the armour of the Chinese who thought they were culturally strong enough to control the influence of the West.
Cronje did the maths. By comparing China’s GDP with its pet spending, you can see the cat and dog line pull away drastically over the past 15 years.
It shouts “bourgeois”.
China’s pets are therefore not merely a cute side effect of rising prosperity. They may be one of its most revealing symptoms. When the family starts buying the dog a birthday cake, you know the revolution has taken a very strange turn indeed.
It never occurred to anyone that, in the West’s attempt to overthrow communism, they might have chosen the wrong tactic. It could have avoided a lot of trouble by sidestepping wars and embargoes, and sending in Lassie and Miaow Tse-Tung instead.
Communism may tell you that class has disappeared. Capitalism may quietly reply: “Maybe, but someone needs to rub Miss Fluffybutt Stinkypants’ belly first thing in the morning.”
I guess we should be grateful the bourgeoisie still licks its own balls.
Vivienne Vermaak is an award-winning journalist and keynote speaker. She is an associate of the Free Market Foundation. She writes in her personal capacity.