RESEARCH ARTICLE Counting the carnivores: Who ate meat in Republican-Era China? Thomas David DuBois School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Email: thomas_dubois@yahoo.com, https://bnu.academia.edu/ThomasDavidDuBois (Received 29 May 2021; revised 12 September 2021; accepted 3 November 2021) Abstract It is commonly asserted that Chinese diets before the market and production reforms of the 1980s contained little or no meat. Yet this nearly universal assumption remains untested: Unlike other forms of material consumption, the question of meat in Chinese diets has received almost no systematic attention from historians. Focusing on the early twentieth cen- tury, this article examines who in China ate meat, and how meat consumption was shaped by regional and household patterns. It combines insights from three sorts of data. First, Japanese price surveys from the 1920s show a high degree of variation in the preference for one type of meat over others, and the price availability of meat versus wages or other food products. Second, production data, including slaughterhouse tallies and industry estimates of animal by-products show the seasonality of animal slaughter and the vast scale and dispersed geog- raphy of China’s livestock production. Finally, nutrition and diet studies from the 1920 to the late 1940s examine actual household consumption, emphasizing how social forces and cycli- cal fortunes shaped individual choices. The composite picture from these three perspectives confirms that China’s meat consumption was hardly inconsequential. But more than simply triangulating a result, the exercise of comparing perspectives of price, production, and nutri- tion also highlights the collection of survey data as a series of historical moments. Keywords: China; meat; prices; stockbreeding; dietary surveys; historical diets China has recently emerged as one of the world’s largest consumers of meat. In 2016, Chinese meat consumption was around 50 kg per capita, just over half the 97.1 kg average in the meat-loving USA, and enough to account for 28 percent of the world’s total (Milman and Leavenworth 2016; OECD 2021; Zhongguo jumin shanshi zhinan 2016). China’s new appetite for meat has attracted global attention, both from producers who hope to find a place in the vast Chinese market and from advocates who fear the health, food safety, and ecological implications of the coun- try’s growing meat imports and domestic livestock production (DuBois and Gao 2017; Schneider 2014). 1 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Science History Association 1 On the reliability of statistics from China’s meat industry, see Yu and Abler (2014). Social Science History (2022), page 1 of 25 doi:10.1017/ssh.2022.17 https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2022.17 Published online by Cambridge University Press