Neoliberalizing Food Safety Control

Abstract

China is the world’s largest aquaculture producer, accounting for 63% of global output by volume. However, since the 2000s, the reputation of China’s seafood has been tainted by a series of drug residue incidents. The need to ensure food safety, combined with the state’s determination to fulfill its responsibility for animal epidemic control in the aftermath of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and avian flu, forced the government to launch a veterinary system reform. This reform sought to transform quasi-public rural vets into market-sensitive and technology-savvy licensed professionals who can discipline unruly fish farmers. However, the vets encountered many dilemmas in balancing food safety versus drug profits, animal health versus human health, and regulatory imperatives versus the practical exigencies of farmers themselves. The article demonstrates how the neoliberal program of cultivating rational and responsible veterinarians redistributes rather than minimizes the risks that result from market-oriented aquaculture production.

Keywords

aquaculture food safety neoliberalism governmentality rural China

In 2007, a newspaper headline caught the public’s attention: “Nation’s Fish Veterinarians Debut in Guangdong” (Su and Cai, 2007). The news report simultaneously celebrated the debut of “modernized” fish veterinarians while exposing the problem of drug residues and its crippling effects on seafood exports. “Guangdong citizens, who enjoy seafood and are audacious [when it comes to what they eat], cannot help feeling scared of aquaculture products,” the article observes. It goes on to ease readers’ concerns about food safety by arguing that the establishment of a licensing system for fish veterinarians might help to standardize drug use. In the future, drug residue scandals would be minimized since fish farmers would need prescriptions from licensed fish vets who not only know how to use advanced technologies for disease diagnosis but also keep updated lists of banned drugs. Simultaneously sanguine and worrisome, this news report encapsulates the many paradoxes in the complex interrelationship between the various actors in China’s aquaculture industry—the state, fishery extension agencies, the market, fish veterinarians, fish farmers—and consumers.

The rapid growth of fish veterinary medicine epitomizes the boom in aquaculture production as part of the so-called “hidden revolution” in agriculture (Huang et al., 2012). Dietary changes toward meat consumption have helped make agriculture profitable, and at the same time have left behind the Maoist remnants of a grain-centered policy that treated animals as production accessories for traction or fertilizer provision rather than as meat for consumption. China is now the largest aquaculture producer in the world, with an output of 57 million tons of seafood in 2012, or 63 per cent of the global total (FAO, 2014). Since 2000, aquaculture has remained the largest sector in agricultural exports, totaling US$18.983 billion, or 30% of the total volume in agriculture in 2012 (Lin and Du, 2013). Guangdong, a pioneering province in the reform era, has also been a leader in fishery production. In 2007, when the fish vet training program was established, Guangdong’s aquatic production reached 6.64 million tons, ranking second nationally (Liu, 2008). The increased incidence of epizootics—an epidemic outbreak of disease in an animal population—is related to farmers’ attempts to boost stocking intensity, stressing cultured animals and thus rendering them vulnerable to disease (Huang, 2015).

Behind drug residue incidents also lies the state’s deregulation of the veterinary medicine market and reduced support for grassroots veterinary stations in the reform era. This has forced rural vets to shift from health-and-welfare based vaccination and quarantines to profit-oriented drug sales and therapeutic treatment.

Rather than cutting back the profit-seeking momentum of aquatic drug sales and restoring its role in the quarantine of diseases, the Chinese state decided to combat drug residues through creating a group of licensed fish vets who will become rational and responsible professionals, capable of disciplining unruly, small fish farmers.

Following fishery extension officials, aquaculture scientists, fish veterinarians, and famers in Guangdong province (Latour, 1987), I explore how the licensed fish veterinary program mirrors the larger issue of the neoliberalization of the Chinese state. I do so by focusing on two issues. The first deals with the macro aspect of the political economy of the veterinary system reform, in which the government divides animal diseases into two categories—epidemic diseases 疫 and regular diseases 病—and delegates treatment to new, professional state-supported official vets 官方兽医 and market-oriented licensed fish vets 执业渔医, respectively. Disease treatment can still be profit-oriented as long as licensed vets standardize 规范 their practices and minimize drug abuse by responding quickly to market signals, such as food recalls, trade bans, or other forms of consumer discontent, on the one hand, and by applying cutting-edge technologies in disease diagnosis, on the other hand. However, the boundary between “epidemic disease” and “regular disease” is a murky one, as animal diseases do not make for easy categorization (Walker and Winton, 2010). This leaves veterinarians in the difficult position of having to monitor complex material realities in negotiating their responsibilities to the state, realities that befuddle even marine biologists.

The second issue I examine is the cultivation of neoliberal subjects in fish veterinary training programs. While fishery managers tout the standardization of disease diagnosis, drug use, and prescription writing as something that will transform rural vets 乡村兽医 into professionals who are both market-sensitive and technology-savvy, fish vets have ambivalent feelings about balancing the needs of drug profits, animal health, and human health with the practical exigencies of the farmers themselves, with whom they are sympathetic.

This article is based on research conducted in 2008 and 2009 to understand how the exposure of antibiotic residue incidents facilitated a change in fishery extension policy from yield maximization to food safety: a shift from quantity to quality, as well as from animal health to human health (Huang, 2012). Rather than viewing neoliberalism as a given feature of certain governments, I argue that we should study the dynamics of neoliberalism involved in the intertwined yet conflictual interests between state and society and the redistribution rather than minimization of risks that emerge from market-oriented production.

Debate on Neoliberalism and State Governance in China

Although neoliberalism has become a widely researched topic among social scientists studying China, there has been an ongoing debate on whether we can apply the term to “authoritarian” regimes (Kipnis, 2007; Nonini, 2008). Before the mid-2000s, political scientists from both the left and the right rejected the idea of describing post-socialist states as “neoliberal,” opting instead for “market socialism” (Schweickart, 1998; Weil, 1996), “development autocracy” (Pei, 2006), and “market Stalinism” (Blecher, 1997; Nolan, 1997). Such views overlook the fact that a neoliberal logic has been formative in China’s economic reforms because of the visible role of the state in engineering the redistribution of power between economy and society. The identification of neoliberalism as the withdrawal of the state and the rule of the “free market” has drawn criticism. Peck and Tickell (2002) point out that even in advanced liberal societies, the retreat of the state in welfare provision is often accompanied by its intervention to eliminate anti-market forces, known as “roll-out” neoliberalism. What is “neo” in contemporary governance, in contrast to the nineteenth-century classic liberal regime, is “not the dismantling but the reengineering of the state” (Wacquant, 2012: 71). “Competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the market” (Read, 2009: 28). The Chinese scholar Wang Hui (2006) reveals how the aftermath of the 1989 movement ushered in a sprawling market economy in China as neoliberalism colluded with forces of neo-authoritarianism and neo-conservatism. In the late 1990s, the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) provided vivid examples of neoliberal economic restructuring (Lee, 2007).

In the mid-2000s, China scholars generally concurred that China could be labeled neoliberal, even though the state plays an indispensable role in creating and preserving an institutional framework for liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms. Has neoliberalism thus become a “universal structural condition” (Ong and Zhang, 2008: 9)? If the label “neoliberalism” can be applied to both liberal and non-liberal regimes, to both state “retreat” and “regrouping” (Sigley, 2006), to both the creation and destruction of a self-motivated workforce (Davis, 2007), to both “anti-poor” and “pro-poor” programs (Ferguson, 2010), has neoliberalism become a holistic system (Kipnis 2007) that reifies everything? After neoliberalism has become “hegemonic as a mode of discourse” (Harvey, 2005), does it still have any utility as an analytical category (Ganti, 2014)? What would be the “Chinese characteristics” that make the study of neoliberalism in the party-state worthwhile?

The publication of a special issue on “Chinese governmentalities” in the journal Economy and Society in late 2006 helped spur academic interest in the debate by introducing Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Rather than viewing power as something to be possessed, Foucault argues that to govern is “to structure the possible field of action of others” (Foucault, 1982). Semantically, governmentality links governing (gouverner) and modes of thought (mentalité) to integrate political rationality with subject formation (Lemke, 2002: 50). The key issue in understanding neoliberalism lies not in whether the state retreats or intervenes in the market, but in “re-defin[ing] the social sphere as a form of the economic domain” (Lemke, 2001: 97). If the Keynesian welfare state interpreted the defense of society as cushioning the negative effects of rampant economic growth, the neoliberal state desired to introduce economic rationality into social policies.

In the special issue, Sigley (2006) argues that in China’s transition from “plan” to “market,” the state’s mandate shifted from “government” (zhengfu) to “governance” (zhili). While the Maoist period deployment of Marxist-Leninism to implement the “socialist art of government” hinged on social and economic planning, the reform period adopted more indirect methods of shaping individual conduct through the deployment of social science—economics, demography, and sociology—in government policy. In the “socialist market economy,” the Chinese party-state is “regrouping” rather than “retreating,” as it continues to use economic levers and policy initiatives to “steer” and “guide” development (Sigley, 2006: 501).

Rather than assuming the socialist legacy is quintessentially non-neoliberal (Kipnis, 2007) or even anti-liberal (Yan, 2010), some anthropologists have adopted a more nuanced framework to understand the “mobile calculative technologies” of neoliberalism (Ong, 2006: 13). The socialist era did not necessarily preclude the encroachment of neoliberalism; on the contrary, the socialist apparatus was refashioned to cultivate neoliberal subjects (Pun, 2005; Yan, 2008). An example is the dang’an (dossier, 档案), a creation of the socialist bureaucratic system for population control and surveillance. In the aftermath of the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s, the dang’an was transformed into a tool for factory managers to fake mass gendered layoffs and line their pockets with funds from the government’s redundant-worker compensation program. At the same time, management promoted a discourse of freedom to encourage workers to leave the public sector so that they could be replaced by much cheaper rural migrants. Here dang’an, as a socialist apparatus, worked as a “specter” that haunts the present (Yang, 2011). Also, in the rustbelt of Harbin, when the state distributed minimal life guarantees (dibao, 低保) to quell social unrest, the socialist principle of anlao fenpei (distribution according to labor, 按劳分配) was invoked to justify welfare allocation based not on need but on one’s “ability to work” (Cho, 2013). All these examples question an essentialist understanding of either socialism or neoliberalism (Anagnost, 2004; He, 2007).

Despite anthropologists’ growing interest in neoliberalism, there has been very little study of “the anthropology of neoliberalism,” as they focus on “specific effects of, and resistance to, neoliberalism, not on the phenomenon itself” (Hoffman et al., 2006: 9). My article traces how neoliberal governance works, rather than assessing the impact of neoliberalism. In the past decade, China has been caught up in one food safety scandal after another. However, scholarly research has tended to target either producers or traders, while paying scant attention to the veterinarians who are tasked with monitoring these potential problems. As the party’s focus changed from social-leveling experiments in the Maoist era to the development of productive forces in the reform era, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” has given way to rule by a technocratic elite (Andreas, 2009). Fishery managers created and put their faith in professional fish vets who were to accomplish a series of paradoxical tasks in a technocratically proficient manner: to meet importers’ food safety standards and increase China’s foreign currency reserves, to reduce farmers’ production costs and protect drug manufacturers’ profits, and to safeguard the health of both animals and humans. Tracing the “politics of scale” (Peet and Watts, 2004) at the global-domestic, rural-urban, as well as human-animal levels, I will pay attention to the ambiguity, contradictions, and instability of both neoliberal policies and discourse so as to deflate their hegemonic power (Gibson-Graham, 1996).

Food Safety Scandals: An Analysis

Food safety incidents have erupted frequently in recent years in China. The most notorious might be the Sanlu incident of 2008, in which tainted baby formula caused the death of 6 infants and illness in about 300,000 others (Pei et al., 2011; Yang, 2013). Other scandals have also aroused public concern, such as the discovery of a toxic food coloring using Sudan dye in chili pepper sauce in 2005,¹ the use of the leanness-enhancing drug clenbuterol in pork production in 2009 (Jiang, 2011), the recycling of gutter oil in late 2009 and early 2010 (Zhou, 2010), and the ongoing controversy surrounding genetically modified rice.

Scholarly discussion and analysis often focus on two aspects related to food safety: the morality of small producers and the state’s heavy-handed intervention in the market. Some argue that the crisis in food safety reflects a moral breakdown among food producers and traders amid growing social distrust in reform-era China (Xiu and Klein, 2010; Yan, 2012). Yan Yunxiang highlights how “poisonous food” in such cases as the Sanlu incident is evidence of producers’ intention to injure consumers’ health and disrupt social trust, in comparison with “unsafe food,” such as pesticide residues, which is merely an outcome of the “unintended consequences of modern technologies” (Yan, 2012: 715). However, this approach fails to recognize how agri-food businesses have taken various methods to reduce production costs, extend storage times, shorten production times, and reduce phase-out rates.² These actions cannot be explained by a discourse of morality, but rather call for a framework of political economy to understand how modern agriculture has gone beyond the process of “farming” for localized production and consumption to become the “agricultural sector” of industrial capitalism (Bernstein, 2010).

Apart from the debate on the nature of food producers, a second approach in food safety analysis highlights the state’s improper intervention in the market and lax enforcement of regulations (Broughton and Walker, 2010; Liu, 2010). Much public discontent has been directed at the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the country’s food safety watchdog, which awarded the Sanlu Group the privilege of an exemption from inspection. It seems that despite the high rate of marketization in China, the state has not completely shed its “authoritarian” character. “Here the regulator plays the role of active player to involve itself in market competition rather than the role of a referee to regulate market competition” (Liu, 2010: 256). This statement resonates with the debate on whether the label “neoliberalism” can be applied in the Chinese context. The notion of “market triumphalism” assumes that the market has a competition mechanism that can cull out 淘汰 unqualified producers. The state should not intervene in the production process, but should operate as a referee that uses legal and technical means to uncover the illicit behavior of food producers.

As the image of “Made in China” became tainted, Chinese consumers flocked to buy baby formula imported from developed countries. However, ample evidence challenges the assumption that food safety scandals do not occur in places of sophisticated market development or with well-established regulatory agencies. For example, the 2008 listeriosis outbreak in Canada reflected the government’s inadequate inspection practices (Hatt and Hatt, 2012). The recent horsemeat scandal in the United Kingdom has been blamed on government cuts in food safety regulation (Taylor and Meikle, 2013). In Australia, the neoliberalization of the dairy industry has resulted not only in the abolishment of state subsidies to farmers but also the devolution of many of the state’s food safety regulatory functions and operations to the private sector (Dibden and Cocklin, 2010). While economists often defend the market’s ability of self-regulation through the slogan “survival of the fittest,” we can see that the “fittest” corporation in the food industry is often not the one that provides quality products that embody care for either the environment or human health. Actually, corporate power has grown so much in the neoliberal era that it has compromised the state’s ability to regulate food production and consumption. All these cases reveal that even in so-called liberal regimes, state food agencies are often trapped in a dilemma between promoting the commodification and industrialization of food production and protecting public health and welfare. The following section discusses how China’s aquatic food safety crisis did not emerge from the moral decline of fish farmers nor excessive intervention by the state, but had to do with the contingencies of international trade regulations, the state’s difficulties in curbing illicit drug production, and rural de-collectivization, which has fragmented the peasantry.

The Birth of Drug Residues

Since China’s entry into the WTO in late 2001, agricultural exports have had to comply with the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures, which member countries adopt to protect human, animal, and plant life or health (Dong, 2011). The chloramphenicol incident of 2001–2002 was a landmark event that started an escalated series of aquatic food safety incidents. In late 2001, the EU Standing Veterinary Committee detected residues of the antibiotic chloramphenicol of 0.5 ppb, exceeding the minimum required performance limit of 0.3 ppb, in shrimp samples from China. They soon voted to suspend imports from China, valued at nearly €330 million annually, including rabbits, poultry, honey, mollusks, crustaceans, frozen shrimps and prawns, and pet food (European Commission, 2002). This unexpected trade ban dealt a devastating blow to China, which was about to make a fanfare presence in the “free market” after struggling for many years to finally join WTO only months previously.

As a broad-spectrum antibiotic, chloramphenicol has been used in China to treat bacterial disease, such as Vibriosis septicaemia (Wang et al., 2004). Although researchers had suspected the drug’s carcinogenicity and identified its links with the development of plastic anemia in human beings as early as the 1950s (Feder et al., 1981), chloramphenicol was still recommended for veterinary use worldwide until banned by the United States in 1994 and the EU in 1996 (Shakila et al., 2006). Since the chloramphenicol incident, “drug residues” 药残 have become a buzzword in the daily conversation of Chinese fishery officials.³

In response, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) quickly took a series of actions to standardize the aquatic veterinary medicine industry, beginning by issuing a list of “Banned Veterinary Drugs and Miscellaneous Chemical Compounds for Food Animals” in March 2002. Two years later, the MOA unified standards on veterinary drugs and required drug manufacturers to obtain approval for each drug they produced. Currently, 157 drug types are incorporated in the National Standards for Aquaculture Usage of Fish Veterinary Medicine 国标渔药 for aquatic production that targets domestic consumption. There were also campaigns that aimed at regulating veterinary medicine manufacturers. “Rules on Management of Veterinary Drug Production and Quality (GMP for Veterinary Drugs)” was passed and became compulsory in 2006, requiring drug manufacturers to standardize their production or face shutdowns. In China, the veterinary medicine industry did not kick off until the 1990s. However, with the rapid growth of animal production and disease threats, demand for veterinary drugs skyrocketed. In 2004, there were 2,700 factories producing such drugs, with an annual output of over 18 billion yuan. After the campaigns, the number of factories dropped to 800 in 2006, but soon expanded to 1,622, with a production value of 20 billion yuan by the end of 2009 (Zhang et al., 2012).

The pass rate of chloramphenicol improved dramatically from 83% in 2002 to 98.4% in 2005 (Fan, 2006). However, food safety scandals over emerging drug residues continue to surface, making it difficult even for fishery managers to follow the rapidly expanding list. In 2006, Japan banned eel imports from China after detection of malachite green residues (Yang et al., 2007). Malachite green is a chemical dye product that can kill bacteria and is commonly used in fish farming to treat fungal infections or in shipments of live fish to keep them fresh. However, this chemical was recognized as a carcinogen in the 1990s. Nitrofuran drugs, a group of artificially synthesized drugs developed in the 1940s and widely used to treat bacterial disease in aquaculture, became another focus of alert as a carcinogen, forcing Japanese and American traders to halt imports in 2006 and 2007 after drug residues were detected (Ahrens, 2007; Radovnikovic et al., 2011).

The continued exposure of antibiotic drug residue scandals has made Chinese fishery managers realize that standardization of drug manufacturing is insufficient and needs to be supplemented by the disciplining of aquaculture producers. However, the supervision of millions of mom-and-pop family farms would not only be costly, but also unrealistic. In my research, fishery managers in Guangdong often voiced their concerns over modernizing fish farmers. Described as “thousands of families and households” 千家万户, they are too scattered to be centralized, too weak to sustain a heavy financial burden, and too ill-educated to absorb emergent knowledge on food safety. When local fishery managers talked of the difficulties of penalizing violators, they often expressed a dilemma between executing the law and “taking away people’s rice bowl” 害人家没有饭吃. Fishery officials seem to consider fish farmers to be inherently “scattered,” “disempowered,” and profit-driven, forgetting that the peasantry’s transformation into competing petty producers toiling for fragmented production was somewhat a recent event sparked by de-collectivization only 30 years ago (Xu, 2013).

Disciplining fish veterinarians seems a more feasible solution. In the future, if farmers only buy prescription drugs issued by licensed fish vets, who can promptly pick up on market signals from importers or domestic consumers, aquatic food safety violations should be mitigated or even overcome.

Veterinary System Reform

The fish veterinary training program is part of the national veterinary system reform 兽医体制改革 launched in 2005 that demarcated the different responsibilities of two types of professionals for animal disease control: official veterinarians for vaccination and quarantine for epidemic diseases, and licensed veterinarians for therapeutic treatment of regular diseases.⁴ In the future, official vets will receive financial support from the state, while licensed vets will have to turn to the market for survival. The training program was set up to transform some existing rural vets into licensed vets.

The need to establish official vets came after China’s entry into the WTO. The state not only had to comply with SPS standards, but was required to establish official vets for food inspection and quarantine. With the more frequent flow of animals across national borders and subsequent growing risks of pathogen and disease spread, China finally restored the exercise of the legal rights and obligations as a sovereign state member of the World Organization for Animal Health (Office International des Epizooties, OIE) in 2007 (Wang, 2010).

However, the real push for the state to resume its role in animal epidemic control came from the urgent need to solve domestic crises—the outbreaks of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and H5N1 avian flu in 2005–2006 exposed the failure of market forces to contain zoonoses, diseases transferred between different animal species (Liu, 2003; Wang and Song, 2004). With the dysfunction of many grassroots veterinary stations, the epidemics were not quickly controlled and spread to many areas of the country.

These sudden outbreaks of zoonoses highlight many problems associated with the transition of animal production in China. In the Maoist era, animal husbandry remained a marginal sector of agriculture under the policy “taking grain as the key link.” Table 1 shows that the share of animal husbandry increased from 15% in “all agriculture” 大农业 in 1978 to 30% in the 2000s. Moreover, during the Maoist era, animals were regarded more as resources for production rather than sources of food (Xu and Li, 1991). In 1957, during the high tide of the rural collectivization, Deng Zihui, the vice premier in charge of agriculture, highlighted the important contribution of the livestock sector to the country’s economic development. The overwhelming use of animals was for traction power: 98% of China’s farmland relied on large animals such as cattle, horses, mules, and donkeys produced by ethnic minorities on the prairie (Deng, 1958: 1). Fertilizer provision was regarded as the second most important function of animals. Mao wrote a letter in 1959 pointing out the mutual interdependence of agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry, especially highlighting hogs and large animals as a source of organic fertilizer, which “were ten times better than chemical fertilizers” (Mao, 1976). Meat consumption ranked only fifth, following transportation and raw materials for light industries (Deng, 1958).

Table 1.

Animal Husbandry Production (billion yuan).

	1957	1978	1990	2000	2012
Gross output value of animal husbandry	6.54	20.93	197	739	2,719
Gross output of all agriculture (farming, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery and related products)	54	140	766	2491	8,945
Animal husbandry as a percentage of all agriculture	12%	15%	26%	30%	30%

Sources. Zhongguo tongji nianjian and Zhongguo nongcun tongji nianjian .

In the reform, as tractors and chemical fertilizers became more and more available, large animals gradually lost their importance, declining from a peak of 150 million in 1999 to only 119 million in 2012 (see Table 2). At the same time, animals have been more and more reduced to sources of protein, as per capita meat output grew rapidly from only 9.1 kg in 1978 to 47.4 kg in 2012, a net gain of 38.3 kg, compared with a minor increase of only 5.04 kg in the Maoist era (see Table 3).

Table 2.

Number of Livestock (millions).

	1949	1957	1978	1990	2000	2012
Large animals	60	84	94	130	146	119
Hogs	68	146	301	362	416	476
Sheep and goats	42	99	170	210	279	285
Poultry	211	600	794	2,261^a	4,640	5,800

Based on 1988 data

Sources. Zhongguo tongji nianjian and Zhongguo nongcun tongji nianjian .

Table 3.

Meat Output.

	1949	1957	1978	1990	2000	2012
Total output (1,000 tons)	2,200	3,985	8,563	28,570^a	60,139^a	83,872^a
Per capital output (kg)	4.06	6.16	9.1	22.1	37.6	47.4

Note. Meat includes pork, beef, and mutton. The numbers with superscript “a” also include poultry and rabbit meat.

Sources. Zhongguo tongji nianjian and Zhongguo nongcun tongji nianjian.

The intensified production of animals has posed a great risk as it creates venues for large virus loads to grow and adapt, while the concentrated setting stresses animals (Lowe, 2010). Industrialized production has broken the interdependent relations between crop farming and animal husbandry and transformed animal manure from fertilizers to polluted waste. More than 80% of large-scale animal farms surveyed in 2007 were located near towns with dense populations without proper waste treatment facilities, posing great risks to the environment and human health (Wang, 2010).

Despite all the warnings against high-intensity, industrial production of livestock, state officials actually blamed small-scale farms for allowing direct animal-human contact, thus leading to the spread of zoonoses. Therefore, they believe the trend toward large-scale, standardized farms should not be slowed down, but expedited, as a way of modernizing the animal husbandry sector (Zhongguo xumuye nianjian, 2006: 13). However, in the aftermath of more and more destructive zoonoses like the avian flu that killed 13 million birds in 2006, animal husbandry officials had to admit that their management oversight, which had been weakened by the decline of the system of vaccination and quarantine associated with the township veterinary station (TVS), had failed (Zhongguo xumuye nianjian, 2007).

TVSs, whose history can be traced back to the collectivization in the late 1950s, are the grassroots-level stations that work directly with farmers in animal farming and disease control. During the Great Leap Forward in 1958, every commune was required to set up vet stations to provide therapeutic and vaccination services for collective livestock (Xu and Li, 1991). By 1967, the country had 39,180 commune vet stations with 200,230 vets (see Table 4). In the 1960s and 1970s, TVSs were run as a cooperative animal disease control program sponsored by the collective. In the mid-1970s, as the state launched a hog farming campaign, TVSs’ finances became “commune sponsored, supplemented by state support” 社办公助 (Xu and Li, 1991: 379). State support averaged 30 million yuan annually from 1976 to 1978 and was increased to 50 million starting in 1979 (Xu and Li, 1991: 380). Funding at the level of the commune came from two sources: the commune public accumulation fund and the work point system. Therefore, rural vets were known as “barefoot” vets who earned work points from both commune farm work and veterinary services (Qu, 2011). Animal disease control was promoted as a mass campaign. In a meeting that called for expanded hog farming in 1975, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry convened the vets from 25 communes to press on them the notion of animal disease control as a form of class struggle. TVSs controlled by “capitalist roaders,” it was said, pursued “money in command, feeding vets through disease treatment, monopoly in technology, promoting private gain at public expense, and performing adulteration” 金钱挂帅, 以病养医, 技术垄断, 损公肥私和弄虚作假. In contrast, those who served the proletariat’s interests focused on “prevention-first” 预防为主 and “mass participation in disease prevention and control” 群防群治 (Anonymous, 1976). TVSs grew steadily in the Maoist years, reaching 50,590 staffed by 288,236 vets in 1979 (see Table 4).

Table 4.

Numbers of Township Veterinary Stations (TVSs) and Rural Vets.

	1967	1979	1989	2000	2004	2012
TVS	39,180	50,590	58,237	43,536	36,875	32,621
Rural vets	200,230	288,236	295,414	307,566	275,548	208,515

Sources. Xu and Li, 1991; Bureau of Animal Husbandry of the Ministry of Agriculture, 1990; Zhongguo xumuye nianjian .

Although the Chinese state decided to terminate the commune as a political structure in 1983, many of its functions were continued, including the TVSs. However, as commune animals were contracted out to households, vet stations lost their sources of revenue and had to offer fee-based services or go bankrupt. Although the state continued to cover part of the salary of the vets, TVSs had to finance themselves through vaccinations and other services such as cooler maintenance and even the sale of needles. In areas where the cooperative disease prevention scheme collapsed, charging money for vaccinations met with farmers’ resistance (Zhang, 2003). The problem of “trust eroded by money” 收钱不贴心 was exacerbated by some vets charging excessive fees. To become self-sufficient and even profitable, many vets began to diversify their services into feed production and sales, meat processing, and even animal breeding (Yuan, 1986). TVSs started to decline in the early 1990s as the devolution of the TVSs from county to township governments further crippled their finances. In Anhui province, of the 3,549 vet stations operating in 1992, over half barely made ends meet or had deficits (Yang and Cui, 1992). In the late 1990s, the central government decided to salvage the TVSs by gradually transforming them into state-owned entities. However, their decline could not be halted (see Table 4). In the 2000s, aging vets found their experience inadequate to deal with the mutating epidemics associated with high-intensity farming, while young people were reluctant to take up this seemingly unpromising career (Li, 2010).

The transition of veterinary services from welfare-based to profit-oriented is also evident in the aquaculture sector. In Zhanjiang, Guangdong, aquaculture development was sporadic before the reform. For instance, fish veterinarians were not affiliated with TVSs but with newly established fishery technology extension centers. Director Lin,⁵ from a county-level extension center, remembered her experience working as a rural fish veterinary:

Our center was established in 1983, when the county government allocated 16,000 yuan to set it up. . . . I joined the center the same year after graduating from an aquaculture technical school. At that time, the main aquaculture species were freshwater fish, especially grass carp. I was responsible for making “vaccine by lay methods” 土法疫苗. The main diseases for grass carp include gill rot, intestinal inflammation, and spleen infection. When I made the vaccine, I cut off the lesion, filtered it, injected formalin, and sterilized it at a high temperature [in a pot]. The temperature needs to remain stable. How did I do it? I took away the lid of the pot, put in a thermometer, and took the pot off the stove when the temperature jumped too high. I had to stay around the pot for two hours. After the vaccine was ready, I rode a bicycle to take it to fish farmers. No matter whether the fish was in the fry stage or already mature, I injected the vaccine into the sick fish, which soon recovered. At that time, we did not have telephones. Whoever wanted the vaccine had to come to our office to tell us. Sometimes I was away and it took farmers a few days to reach me. It cost 2–5 cents for one injection.⁶ I put the vaccine in a cooler and rode a bike to go everywhere. . . . I was reputed to be an “injection talent” 注射能手 who could inject a maximum of 2,000-plus fish a day.

Lin considered her work to be “serving the people.” Her salary was fixed and was not associated with the amount of work she did. Farmers were charged a low price for the vaccine. However, the vaccination work was terminated in 1986 when the county government gradually withdrew financial support from the center, hoping that the market would take over automatically. In the shift from non-profit to for-profit services, the center decided to give up support for low-priced freshwater fish farming and to turn to a high-value species of shrimp, assigning Director Lin the new task of setting up a shrimp hatchery.

With the state’s declining investment in vaccination and quarantines, epizootics soon erupted. The most devastating case was the spread of white spot syndrome in shrimp in 1993, which wiped out 60% of China’s production, from 220,000 tons in 1991 to only 88,000 tons in 1993 (Xie and Yu, 2007). The infection spread throughout most of Asia during the mid-1990s and subsequently to the Americas from 2001, almost certainly as a consequence of the international transportation of live shrimp broodstock without effective quarantine measures (Briggs et al., 2004).

After the outbreak of zoonoses and other serious epizootics, the government decided against letting the market rule animal disease control and promulgated a revised Animal Epidemic Prevention Law in 2008 in an attempt to salvage the malfunctioning non-profit vaccination and quarantine services. However, the neoliberalizing state still wanted to maximize the market function and therefore divided animal health control services into two types: welfare-based vaccination and quarantine services and fee-based disease treatment. Accordingly, diseases were categorized as epidemics 疫, that is, infectious and parasitic animal diseases, and regular diseases 病.⁷ Along the same lines, fish veterinarians have also been divided into two groups: official fish vets handle epidemics by conducting disease vaccination and quarantines, while licensed vets are supposed to offer therapeutic treatment for regular diseases. However, the functions of the two groups also overlap. Since official vets do not work with fish farmers directly, they rely on licensed fish vets to detect signs of epizootics. Only after an epidemic has been confirmed is the duty of disease control transferred from licensed to official vets. Moreover, when there is an epidemic, licensed fish vets must assist official vets in stamping-out dangerous activities.

The division between epidemics and regular diseases roughly follows the line between public service and for-profit service but, in reality, animal diseases do not make for easy categorization. On the one hand, if licensed fish vets identify an epidemic that can be countered only by a stamping-out campaign, they are supposed to report such epidemics to the fishery management agencies but not engage in treatment themselves.⁸ On the other hand, if they mistakenly report a regular disease as an epidemic disease, causing the local government to launch an unnecessary eradication campaign, the central government will not be responsible for the expenses, leaving it to the local government to bear the costs. Trainees participating in licensing training expressed concern that the line between epidemic diseases and regular diseases was not clear and that the list of epidemic diseases was constantly changing. They also worried that they might not have the proper knowledge or equipment to identify outbreaks of epidemic diseases accurately.

Trainees’ concerns were not unfounded. Although “new” epizootics emerge from time to time, many fish pathogens are actually endemic among native and healthy fish populations, but trigger the outbreak of disease only in stressful culture conditions. In other words, what’s new about the new epidemics is not the sudden emergence of a new virus, but the deteriorating farm conditions that turn those virus strains virulent. A recent emerging disease is “early mortality syndrome”—whose causative agent is a strain of Vibrio bacteria native in estuarine waters worldwide—which triggered an epidemic that spread to China, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam, contaminating about 39,000 hectares of shrimp ponds in Vietnam and creating production losses of US$100 million in Malaysia in 2011 (FAO, 2014). This shows that “contagion” reflects not so much the existing status of pathogens, but the declining living environment of cultured organisms.

Before an epidemic is officially established, how can licensed fish vets know that a regular disease will evolve into an epidemic? Should they treat it at the stage of a regular disease or wait until the state declares an epidemic? What is the boundary between state intervention and market responsibility? There are no easy answers to these questions because of the uncertainty of both the material and human world. Rather than challenging today’s high-intensity farming that compromises the health of cultured animals, the state seems to be caught up in fluctuations between epidemics and regular diseases, leading to the spread of disease rather than the mitigation of risks.

Licensed Fish Veterinarians Training Program

The fish veterinary system reform encompassed contradictory responsibilities in its design. On the one hand, it represented a neoliberal project in which the state retreated to allow the logic of the market to rule. On the other hand, the state needed to intervene so as to set up the so-called “phase-out mechanism” of the market. While the market encouraged the rapid expansion of fish drug production and sales, it also created many drug residue incidents that crippled China’s seafood exports. Therefore, the market threatened to become a disordered space, requiring the state to step in and regulate unruly action.

The newly created group of licensed fish veterinarians have to navigate the murky borders between state and market. Financially, they are not expected to depend on the state, but are to be rational business people “responsible for their own profits and losses.”⁹ However, their activities at the same time are supervised by the state, especially when the prescribing of inappropriate drugs might affect the country’s seafood exports.

The first licensed fish veterinary training program was launched in Guangzhou in August 2007. As one of the top aquaculture producers in the country, Guangdong was selected to run this pilot project as part of the broader agenda called the “Action Plan for Promoting Healthy Aquaculture” 水产健康养殖推进行动, which the Ministry of Agriculture launched in 2006 to standardize fish farming practices to meet international food safety standards (Guangdong Fishery Technology Extension Center, 2008). The Guangdong Fisheries Technology Extension Center (GFTEC) was selected to organize the program. Most participants had many years of veterinary experience and were called “rural fish vets,” but after training they were to be licensed. Director Wen helped trainees identify who they were as rural vets.

If you cannot become a formal 正规 vet, then you can just remain a rural vet. . . . [Rural vets are] those who originally do this [treating aquatic diseases], have some skills, and are recognized by society. However, they have not received formal training, and are “nonprofessional” 土. Let’s say . . . [they] are like the barefoot doctors of the past. Yes, barefoot doctor is the analogy.

Here, the term “barefoot” is associated with “nonprofessional.” If the state considers licensed fish vets to be capable of combating aquatic food safety problems, what kinds of transformation did rural vets need to undergo to change from “barefoot” to “licensed” status?

Recruitment

In the near future, the fish veterinary license will not be an option but a legal requirement for those selling drugs to farmers. In five to ten years’ time, those who are not licensed will not be allowed to practice. Fish veterinarians will become the fifth category of professionals to be licensed through a qualification exam, along with medical doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and accountants, according to Director Yan from the National Fisheries Technology Extension Center (NFTEC). Article 54 of the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law specifies that those who hold at least an associate degree may register for the state-administered examination for certified veterinarians. If this standard is adopted, many currently practicing rural fish veterinarians will not be qualified because they lack the necessary educational credentials. The state decided to implement policies to accommodate this experienced older generation of fish veterinarians. Director Yan vividly summarized the recruitment principle as “old ways for old people; new ways for new people” 老人老办法, 新人新办法.¹⁰ “New people,” college graduates majoring in aquaculture disciplines, will need to pass the national qualification exam to get accredited. In contrast, senior rural vets can go with the “old ways” to get a license through attending a short-term (15-day) training program.

The trainees for the first program, which took place in 2007, were recruited from among vets working in shrimp aquaculture in Zhanjiang, the largest shrimp production base in China. The second and third programs were launched in 2008 to expand recruitment to other cities—including Zhaoqing, Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhuhai, and Jiangmen—specializing in eel, tilapia, and turtle aquaculture. Trainees generally came from three representative groups, including officials from local fishery extension centers, technicians in large fish farms or hatcheries, and vets from fishery drug dispensaries, reflecting the diversity of rural fish vets ready to be trained. In the third program, which I attended, 11 of the 32 trainees had a degree below an associate degree. Among them, eight were vets coming from fishery drug dispensaries, a much higher proportion than those from either extension agencies or fish farms and hatcheries.

The program incorporated three main components: 1) clinical diagnosis of fish diseases, including diseases of finfish, shrimp, and reptiles; 2) fish pharmaceuticals, including drug categories, pharmacology (drug efficacy and metabolism), and drug application; 3) laws and regulations, such as the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law, Regulation on Veterinary Drug Administration, and the Agricultural Product Quality Safety Law.

“Many of your current practices are not standardized 规范,” Director Wen from GFTEC said, “therefore, in the future you need to standardize your practices, particularly in terms of disease diagnosis and drug prescription.”

Standardizing Disease Diagnosis

The standardization of disease diagnosis involves using scientific methods for pathogen detection of regular diseases.¹¹ Currently, diagnosis is mostly based on observation of symptoms, or worse, an oral description of symptoms or lesions by the fish farmer. In the future, licensed fish veterinarians will not only need to observe symptoms, but more importantly, use scientific equipment to detect pathogens. Instructors emphasized that similar symptoms might be caused by different pathogens. For example, hemorrhaging in grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idellus) is often caused by a virus, while the same symptom in crucian carp (Carassius carassius) might indicate a bacterial infection. It is also important to differentiate secondary infection from primary infection and confirm the pathogen of the primary infection. Therefore, mere eye observation is not reliable and vets must resort to microscopy of bacteria in micrometers (µm, 10⁻⁶ m) and even viruses in nanometers (nm, 10⁻⁹ m) to know the exact causes of disease. Finally, drug sensitivity tests must also be conducted because the frequent use of certain drugs has increased microorganisms’ resistance (Yuan et al., 2012).

Trainees range in age and educational background. The middle-aged have had many years of disease treatment experience, but most of them have only a secondary technical school education and have not kept themselves well-informed about more recent scientific developments. A few young college graduates have plenty of lab experience, but little hands-on experience in disease treatment. While instructors emphasized the importance of using cutting-edge technology to identify pathogens, trainees were not excited about the glamour of science. One student who has owned a fish drug store for more than 20 years commented that the only equipment they had was a simple microscope in the store, which was not often used. In most cases, disease diagnosis was not even desired by customers who assumed that they knew what drugs to buy. Moreover, their objective was to cure the disease instead of doing scientific research. If they spent a few days doing various tests to confirm the pathogen, the sick fish would die before any drugs were administered. The pathogens worked too fast to wait. So, if even the experts recognized that virus-generated disease had no cure, why waste time identifying the pathogen? Rather than wiping out the pathogen, their primary objective was to minimize farmers’ financial loss.

Apart from covering textbook learning, the fish veterinary training program also encompassed lab work that taught trainees how to identify bacteria and viruses. While the identification of bacteria seemed acceptable to experienced fish veterinarians, virus detection proved too difficult for them. Trainees who sat around me often looked at each other with confusion when the instructor introduced loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, two of the most common tools currently used for virus detection. They separated DNA pieces and put them in a machine for multiplication, but what the machine was doing and why remained too abstract. When the sample was found to be infected with virus, trainees got quite excited. However, when they heard that the PCR machine cost 100,000 yuan and the experiment materials were also expensive, they soon lost their enthusiasm. “Fish farmers won’t pay the high cost of pathogen identification. We often earn only 10 or 20 yuan from drug sales. If we charge 50 yuan just for pathogen detection, nobody will come to my store.”

The fish vets’ lukewarm interest in learning cutting-edge technologies for pathogen detection should not be interpreted as a manifestation of their lack of qualifications, as some instructors also questioned the linear causal relationship between the presence of pathogens and disease outbreak. Professor Hu from a municipal inspection and quarantine bureau stated that human beings had domesticated terrestrial animals for tens of thousands of years. Except for a few new diseases, such as BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), most diseases have been very stable. In contrast, world aquaculture has a history of only decades. Aquatic animals have not been totally domesticated and we do not understand the interaction between aquatic animals and the environment very well. Pathogens do not necessarily lead to disease. A virus can turn into a pathogen that destroys the immune system of fish and causes disease, but at the same, it can stimulate the immune system and enhance resistance to disease. One important element that determines whether a virus acts as a pathogen or antigen is water temperature. When the temperature is low, the virus grows slowly and does not cause disease. When the temperature is high, the antibody grows quickly to resist disease. Only when the temperature falls into a certain range can pathogens outcompete antibody production and trigger disease. Director Yan also reiterated that pathogens changed much more dramatically for aquatic animals than for terrestrial animals. For example, Aeromonas hydrophila was originally not pathogenic, but has now evolved into a virulent strain, in which ten bacteria can kill one fish.

All these cases have complicated the program designers’ efforts at modernizing the practices of rural vets.

Standardizing Drug Use

Another difficult task for rural fish vets is the prescription of standardized drugs. Licensed fish veterinarians are supposed to use only drugs listed on the National Standards, as explained earlier, and also manufactured by an authorized factory. However, the National Standards are not necessarily considered safe outside of China and some drugs are banned in the United States or Europe. For example, nine drugs, including enrofloxacin, that are allowed in aquaculture in China are prohibited for use in the United States (Li, 2009). In the training program, Director Chang of the NFTEC told trainees that importers’ lists of banned drugs come not only from the market signal of consumer demand, but also domestic producers’ requests. For example, in Japan, customs used to test for only two kinds of drug residue in the early 2000s. However, in 2001, China suddenly expanded exports of eel and caused the price to slide, driving many Japanese eel farmers bankrupt. After that, the Japanese government raised the food safety testing criteria to increase the number of tested drugs to 11 in 2002, 23 in 2004, 116 in 2006, and 119 in 2008, causing a series of food safety incidents involving Chinese imports (Li, 2012).

The appropriate dosage of drugs is also a problem. Fish veterinarians often suggested that fish farmers did not rigorously follow the directions on the packaging, especially by increasing the dosage. An expert on parasites commented that fish lived in open water, making it difficult to apply pesticides. In the lab, parasites that are separated from fish can be killed effectively by drugs. However, when you apply the same pesticides in water, the drug fails to go through the gills to enter the fish’s body. Another instructor explained that the drug factories were afraid of being sued by customers and tended to put a lower dosage in the directions. Moreover, standard drug dosages were determined by lab experiments. However, with the current increased resistance to drugs, suggested dosages might not be effective.

Probably the most challenging issue in standardizing drug use is where to find substitutes for banned drugs. Once, I interviewed a fishery management official in Zhanjiang on the difficulty of prohibiting “banned” drugs. To my surprise, he did not resort to the conventional discourse of the “low quality” of farmers. Instead, he criticized the government’s practice:

I don’t think that what we’re doing in China now is appropriate. I mean “blocking” 堵. This is like controlling a flood. You can’t just block, but you also need to dredge 疏. . . . You can’t just tell people that you can’t use this drug, but you also need to tell them what the substitutes are. For example, for certain fish diseases, only nitrofuran is effective. Now you tell people not to use it, but don’t tell them what can be used instead. How can you stop [the use of illicit drugs]?

Student Wei shared a similar sentiment. He used to work at a local aquaculture extension agency, but had to quit, along with his colleague, owing to internal politics. Later, the two of them opened a fish pharmacy and became fish veterinarians. He also assisted with the organization of the local eel association that helped fish farmers meet exporters’ (especially Japanese) demands. No doubt, he is an expert on food safety, but he was quite sympathetic to farmers who were still clinging to the use of banned drugs. “The biggest issue for the countryside is that farmers don’t have any kind of security 保障. Why do they use malachite green? It costs only 1 yuan per mu [1 hectare = 15 mu]. Dirt cheap. If their fish and shrimp get sick, can they refrain from taking action 能不管吗?”

Another complicated issue is that licensed fish veterinarians have the right to prescribe but not to sell drugs, according to Director Yan from NFTEC. They are supposed to run aquatic animal clinics 诊疗所, but not pharmacies. This seems to reflect fishery managers’ concerns that disease diagnosis should be impartial, separated from for-profit drug sales. However, Director Wen told me that in their plans to set up animal clinics in the future, the most ideal locations would be inside veterinary drug dispensaries, followed by large aquaculture production bases, and grassroots extension agencies. As I puzzled why they wanted to integrate disease diagnosis and drug sales, Director Wen chortled, “Just like human doctors, you can’t have a hospital without a pharmacy. After the doctor issues the prescription, the patient has to go outside to get an intravenous drug. That’s impossible, right?” While he used the client’s convenience as an explanation, he clearly knew quite well that without the state’s financial support, the vets would not be able to make a living apart from selling drugs.

These cases demonstrated the state’s difficulties in regulating the profit-oriented veterinary medicine industry as well as fish vets’ dilemma in balancing food safety and meeting farmers’ demands.

Standardizing the Prescription System

The uncertainties and paradoxes came to a head in the standardization of prescription writing. Although many trainees had prescribed fish drugs for years, they had not written prescriptions before. Officials from GFTEC viewed the prescription system as an empowerment apparatus that would legitimate the practices of licensed veterinarians, since those without licenses would no longer be allowed to issue prescriptions. Moreover, instructors reiterated that by standardizing their activities through the prescription system, licensed vets would be protected from being sued by drug users. The standardized prescription system includes two kinds of records: a disease diagnosis record and a drug prescription.¹² Written forms will not only be more reliable than oral instructions, but will leave a tracking record behind. The fish veterinarians are required to keep prescriptions on file for two years.

While extension officials touted the prescription system as a tool for empowerment, the trainees saw it as a double-edged sword. They were concerned that written records might make them vulnerable to litigation. One fish drug seller told me that once he prescribed some antibiotics to a fish farmer who reported his carp had gill disease. After applying the drug, the fish all died the next day and caused the fish farmer a loss of hundreds of thousands of yuan. The fish farmer went to court to ask the fish vet for compensation. However, since there was no written record, the court could not gather sufficient evidence to charge the drug seller. He told me that very few drug sellers wanted to issue a written prescription for fear of lawsuits.

After the training program was over, I interviewed Director Feng from GFTEC on the trainees’ concern about being sued by farmers, but he tried to dismiss the vets’ worries:

If you saw one fish dead in the pond, it meant 20 percent of the fish already had the disease. You can’t say that the drug kills fish. Of course, drugs might have some stimulating effect on sick fish, speeding up the dying process possibly from three days to one. Even with written prescriptions, it’s actually difficult for farmers to level charges 指证. Who knows whether he or she increased the dosage or not? There’s no evidence. If farmers really want to bring a case to court, most of the time they’ll lose. They know that it’s hard for them to give evidence. Therefore they seldom file a lawsuit.

I present the debate here not to argue whether the prescription system benefits farmers or the fish vets more, but rather to pinpoint the intertwined relations between the state and society. When the state wanted to retreat from the management of so-called regular diseases and push the responsibility onto the market, it redistributed the risks. Here, society is not a monolithic entity ready to resist the state, but each “stakeholder” (veterinarians and farmers) devises strategies to transfer the risks to others.

Conclusion

Food safety has definitely been a focal point of media and public attention in the past decade in China. Tracing the case of the licensed fish veterinary reform, I show the complexity involved in solving the problem of aquatic drug residues. In this article, I refrain from two conventional approaches in food safety analysis: the morality discourse and the state’s improper intervention in the market. Farmers’ behavior is less determined by individual moral upbringing than by the position they occupy in the “agricultural sector” of industrial capitalism. As petty commodity producers, they chase high-yield production that incubates conditions for frequent disease outbreaks, rendering drug use indispensable. However, as a group located on the lower rungs of society, their livelihood is closely linked to the social stability of the country, making legal and economic punishment a thorny issue. Some political scientists call for the retreat of the state and argue that market signals best orchestrate supply and demand, eliminating shoddy goods and practices. However, the discourse of state retreat fails to take into account the dialectic role of the state in balancing interests between economy and society, or non-profit with for-profit services.

My research examines how neoliberalism is played out in the “non-liberal” contexts of rural China so as to augment understanding of the “transformative capacity” of neoliberal governance (Peck and Tickell, 2002). The concept of neoliberalism is instrumental in analyzing contemporary aquatic food safety control in China at two levels. The veterinary system reform revealed the state’s deliberate intention to draw a boundary between society and economy by letting official veterinarians handle the public service of epidemic control and delegating to licensed vets the task of treating regular disease. However, the boundary between the two is murky, as “regular diseases” might develop into “epidemic diseases” and eventually force the state to intervene. Fish vets have been instructed to make their living from the market rather than from the state. As individuals profiting from drug sales, can they help farmers save fish but at the same time not violate food safety regulations? The standardization of drug use is also paradoxical, as it does not change production modes for disease prevention and mitigation, but focuses on adhering to seafood importers’ market signals. Scientific diagnosis of disease is not simply a matter of using advanced equipment for pathogen detection. All these paradoxes reveal the uncertainty underlying the process that rural vets need to undergo to become modern professionals.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ann Anagnost, Hsu Wenlu, Teresa Kuan, Celia Lowe, Mia Siscawati, and the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (#7722) in 2008; National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (#0823446) in 2008; and a University of Washington China Program Grant in 2011.

Notes

Author Biography

Yu Huang, PhD, is an adjunct assistant professor in the Anthropology Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include agrarian change, science and technology studies (STS), political ecology, aquaculture, science extension networks, and rural cooperatives in contemporary China.

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