China Is Running Short of Donkey for Dinner

Foreign Policy · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from RSS

Full Article

A local news report revealing that high prices for donkey meat were forcing some restaurants in Henan province to switch to horse meat in their soup went viral on Chinese social media a few weeks ago. Reportedly, some soup joints in Zhengzhou had even added the character for “horse” beside “donkey” on their shopfronts, showing that they expect this to be a permanent change. Prices have jumped by as much as 50 percent since last year—now reaching roughly twice the price of beef—after food safety crackdowns abruptly exposed a supply base that had been shrinking for decades. Online commentators, mostly northerners, have been bemoaning prices, while southern Chinese wondered why anyone would want to eat donkey in the first place. A local news report revealing that high prices for donkey meat were forcing some restaurants in Henan province to switch to horse meat in their soup went viral on Chinese social media a few weeks ago. Reportedly, some soup joints in Zhengzhou had even added the character for “horse” beside “donkey” on their shopfronts, showing that they expect this to be a permanent change. Prices have jumped by as much as 50 percent since last year—now reaching roughly twice the price of beef—after food safety crackdowns abruptly exposed a supply base that had been shrinking for decades. Online commentators, mostly northerners, have been bemoaning prices, while southern Chinese wondered why anyone would want to eat donkey in the first place. As China completes its change from an agricultural society to an industrial one, a staple meat of northern China has slowly turned into a luxury—with consequences from Africa to Brazil. Even for specialized demands, China’s scale means that demand there can shake ecologies and markets thousands of miles away. Donkey has long been a regional specialty in northern China, where the drier, cooler weather is more conducive to raising the animals. The saying goes that “heaven has dragon meat; Earth has donkey meat.” Perhaps the place most associated with the meat is Hebei province, surrounding Beijing, where donkey restaurants will prepare the meat, organs, and even the entire head for diners. The most common preparation is the “donkey burger”—slices of the lean, gamey meat stuffed alongside peppers into a crispy pancake, sold by chains and vast numbers of mom-and-pop holes-in-the-wall. The pride in the snack is great enough that at least two different cities in Hebei claim to be its hometown. One romantic story goes that an emperor traveling through the region was once served donkey out of necessity and proclaimed it delicious. A more plausible tale is economic: The arrival of railroads in the early 20th century sharply reduced demand for pack animals, leaving the region with a surplus. A man in a chef's hat and another in a hooded coat walk by a restaurant with a sign in Chinese and English. The English type reads: Wang Pang Zi Donkey Burger." People walk past a popular restaurant that specializes in donkey meat sandwiches and hot pot in Beijing on Jan. 9, 2014. Stephen Shaver/ZUMA Press Wire In the mid-1990s, China was a donkey superpower. It had nearly 10 million, around a quarter of the global population and far more than any other country. But the size of China’s donkey herd has crashed by 85 percent since then. The main driver of this decline has been the mechanization of farms—donkeys were kept as a working animal, with the meat as a byproduct. By 2024, China’s mechanization rate for crop planting and harvesting was 74 percent—up from just 32 percent in 2000. Even though China’s meat market has grown tremendously over the same period, with consumption roughly doubling, few farmers have chosen to raise donkeys specifically for meat. The biggest reasons for this are biological. Donkeys take longer to reach sexual maturity and are slower breeders compared to other livestock—a fact often jokingly attributed to their stubborn nature. In modern agriculture, however, biology is also a function of investment. Ian Lahiffe, a Beijing-based agricultural technology consultant, explains that genetics companies have shown little interest in improving the “efficiency” of donkeys, which are viewed as too niche compared to cattle or pigs. This creates a feedback loop as popular livestock become ever more productive—according to U.N. statistics, China’s meat yield per cow has growth by some 50 percent since the 1980s, while donkeys have stagnated. Moreover, the government hasn’t ever seen the donkey industry as being particularly important, Lahiffe said, unlike the beef industry, where farmers have been urged to invest, lured by preferential policies and cash subsidies. By comparison, the government hasn’t ever offered large-scale subsidies to donkey farmers. One consequence of this is that while farmers of beef and other mainstay proteins are offered subsidies to hold onto their breeding stock, when the market is offering high prices for donkey products—especially ejiao, a traditional Chinese medicine made from the animals’ hides—farmers often slaughter all their donkeys, further reducing herd sizes. This means that a substantial amount of the donkey meat eaten in China today is imported. Official customs figures only offer combined horse and donkey meat statistics. In that category, just three countries officially export to China—Uruguay, Brazil, and Mongolia, with the latter making up the vast majority. Chinese media reports suggest that the South American exporters supply most of the donkey meat in that category, worth a few million dollars a year. There have also been some sporadic imports of live donkeys from Kyrgyzstan. Besides the official trade, there’s also smuggling—in 2024, a gang that smuggled 13 tons of donkey meat into China from Vietnam was busted after their ship collided with a fishing boat in the Taiwan Strait. Expanding supply further isn’t easy. The countries that could potentially supply large numbers of donkeys look a lot like China did decades ago—developing countries where animals still are a crucial tool on farms. A farmer pushes a wheelbarrow toward the camera between rows of donkeys in pens eating from troughs in a semi-open stable. A local farmer walks through pens of donkeys bred for meat in Moxiang village in northern China’s Hebei province on June 15, 2020.Reuters The donkey trade is uniquely destabilizing because it’s inherently extractive. When international demand rises, it does not trigger investment in breeding; it leads to the liquidation of existing herds. This means that the business can be politically sensitive. While there are no legal exports of donkey meat to China from Africa, concern over growing demand for donkey skins used to make ejiao led to the African Union imposing a continent-wide ban last year on donkeys being slaughtered for their skin. Lauren Johnston, senior research fellow at the AustChina Institute, has labeled the trade a case of “blood donkeys” due to the harm that it has had on local communities. In Brazil, donkey slaughter increased about 8,000 percent in recent years, far exceeding the pace of breeding. Pakistan—home to some 6 million donkeys—has approved exports of the meat to China in principle, though no company has yet been approved to embark on the trade. Peru also approved exports in 2024, though likewise, no shipments have yet occurred. The difficulty of expanding imports means that foreign donkeys haven’t been the key factor in keeping the lid on meat prices in recent years. The big problem is fraud. Usually, this takes the form of unscrupulous merchants passing off horse, mule, or the legs of elderly sows. In one notorious 2014 case, Walmart China was found selling “donkey meat” adulterated with fox. Horse meat is about two-thirds cheaper than donkeys. This is because supply is greater—China has about twice as many horses as it has donkeys—and demand is lower. Horse has never been widely eaten in China. There are a few theories as to why this is the case, such as ancient government edicts limiting horse slaughter due to the need to maintain a strategic reserve of horses in case of attack from armies of mounted nomads. Another factor may be that the meat is perceived to be of lower quality. Some traditional Chinese medicine texts even warned that the meat may be poisonous. Swapping horse for donkey was more or less an open secret—ask any uncle in Hebei and they would tell you. But last year, it came into the spotlight as the subject of an exposé by a Beijing newspaper found a network of filthy Hebei workshops adding carcinogenic chemicals to change the color of horseflesh to better resemble donkey meat, which was then sold into the capital The Chinese capital is always politically sensitive. China’s leaders don’t want poison in their meat, and so there has since been a series of crackdowns that have surely made merchants wary of faking their supply. For instance, the Liaoning provincial government announced that this year it has seized more than 500 tons of fake donkey meat. Authorities in Beijing, Henan province, and Jiangsu province have all made similar statements this year. Is there a way to make the donkey meat industry both legitimate and sustainable? It would be easy if the government decided to make the meat a priority and started offering subsidies to farmers to incentivize them to hold onto their herds, Lahiffe said. In practice, he doubts that this will come to pass at a national level. As China’s beef producers come under pressure from cut-price Brazilian beef imports, the national authorities may be reluctant to be seen supporting a rival red meat. Absent intervention, donkey meat is likely to be transformed from a working-class staple into a luxury product. This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here.