China deserves its hamburger: the controversy over WildAid’s Shu Shi campaign in China

ABSTRACT

We analyze the responses of Chinese netizens to U.S.-based WildAid’s Shu Shi campaign, which was launched in China in 2018 with aims to reduce the nation’s meat consumption in support of climate change mitigation. We conduct an interpretive content analysis of approximately 3,000 online comments, finding that nationalist sentiment is the most prevalent theme underlying responses to the campaign. Netizens generally see the campaign as a criticism of their national identity. They define this identity by emphasizing China’s achievements, expressing a need for the population’s autonomy, recalling a collective history of humiliation by Western actors, and taking pride in Chinese food culture. Feelings among netizens of unfair treatment weakened the campaign’s effectiveness. Respondents cite national identity, nationalism, and climate justice in micro-level discourses to challenge the legitimacy of WildAid’s efforts to encourage reduced meat consumption as a climate change mitigation strategy in China. This study adds depth and nuance to our understanding of national identity, nationalism, and the perceived effectiveness of strategies encouraging behavior change to mitigate climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• vegetarian campaigns
• climate change mitigation
• social identity theory
• Chinese national identity
• nationalism
• reduced meat consumption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. WildAid has been involved in wildlife protection work in China since 2005. Their most influential and successful program is the 2011 shark-conservation program. This campaign aimed to reduce shark fin consumption, gaining support from the public, earning a reputation for the organization, and contributing to the decline in China’s shark fin consumption (Jeffreys 2016).

2. Shu Shi (蔬食) denotes a diet habit based on vegetables. WildAid’s Shu Shi campaign encourages individuals to live a more low-carbon lifestyle. See: https://wildaid.org/chinese-stars-promote-diets-that-improve-health-and-fight-climate-change/ for more information.

3. While a comprehensive literature review on Chinese nationalism is beyond the scope of our paper, this piece should be read in the context of the current rise of China’s cyber-nationalism (Ng and Le Han 2018, Schneider 2018). Scholars identify internet users who voluntarily defend the country’s socialism from criticism in the name of the ‘voluntary fifty-cent army’ (Han 2015) or ‘Little Pink’ (Fang and Repnikova 2018). The Little Pinks emerged as a natural result of the Internet, rather than as a result of government activities. They came from Jinjiang Literary City, an online platform for sharing unique works on romantic love. Users of the website, the majority of whom are women in their twenties, were dubbed ‘Little Pinks’ since the website’s background was pink. These literature fans also frequent a hidden forum on the Jinjiang website for political discussion. Their major political orientation is nationalistic-oriented, and they frequently argue against anyone who opposes the state (Wei and Juan 2022).

4. Climate scientists’ emails and other papers were made public online in November 2009. The scandal, known as ‘Climategate’ in the media and blogosphere, was prompted by climate change denialists who used the content to claim that scientists were falsifying and hiding evidence that refuted the severity of climate change. Several committees investigated the published reports and found no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct (Maibach et al. 2012).

5. ‘History heat’ indicates strong interests in China’s history which depicts Imperial China as benevolent, strong, and far greater than the Western world. It is a phenomenon that arose in China after Xi’s inauguration.

6. Since its establishment in March 2013, ‘Vegetarian Planet’ developed from a personal hobby to share vegetarian recipes, ingredients and restaurant information, to a mechanism to deliver environmental protection information, and promote ‘vegetarian life’ to a community of 100,000+ fans. A self-described lifestyle-change enterprise, the organization inspires healthy, sustainable, and caring choices, and promotes aware, emotional, and intelligent consumption.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juan Du

Juan Du is an assistant professor of sociology at Huizhou University. She has research interests in climate change policy and perceptions, environmental justice, food access and inequality, and social movements.

John Chung-En Liu

John Chung-En Liu is an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, and a faculty affiliate in the International Program on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. Liu received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has a wide array of research interests in environmental sociology, economic sociology, and climate change policy.

Tamara L. Mix

Dr. Tamara L. Mix is the Laurence L. and Georgia Ina Dresser Professor of Rural Sociology and Head of the Department of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. She has research interests in environmental justice, race, class and gender inequality, and social movements. A qualitative researcher, Dr. Mix’s current projects focus on environmental and social justice activism, food access and inequality, and human dimensions of resource extraction and production.