Hairong Huang

When the Communist Party seized power, China raised fewer than 60 million pigs; by the end of the Mao era, the number had soared to nearly 300 million. These pigs were reimagined as socialist resource factories, from which the Maoist regime could extract a ceaseless supply of capital to fuel national development. Synthesizing archival documents, veterinary research, oral histories, and other untapped sources, this study critically examines the Maoist “swine revolution,” which sought to revolutionize pig productivity through radical policies and technological fantasies, thus reducing sentient animals to lifeless resources. Was Maoist China engineering a revolutionary species or entrenching a speciesist revolution? Pigs are not like steel; their sentient nature deeply affected how local people perceived life and death. This research explores how pigs, as sentient beings, affected human relations with more-than-human worlds, contributing to ongoing debates on multispecies histories, agrarian ecology, and contradictions of socialist animal agriculture.