China Slams Vegetarianism as the ‘Blind Worship of the West’
The sudden vitriol toward vegetarians comes after a particular celebrity video
© press
The Chinese Communist Party's media mouthpiece, the Global Times, said vegetarianism is an unhealthy obsession of entertainers in China who blindly worship Western values.
The sudden vitriol toward vegetarians comes after a particular celebrity video.
Zhang Jingchu and Tao Hong, both well-known Chinese actresses, appeared in a 45-minute documentary, during which they promoted the idea that eating vegetables is healthy while eating meat is cruel and unnecessary from a nutritional perspective.
“If you eat that piece of beef, it’s like driving a car for 60 kilometers, and you can feed 30 vegetarians on the same piece of land, while you can only feed one carnivore,” the documentary said, connecting vegetarianism with reducing carbon emissions.
© press
The stars and the video called vegetarianism fashionable, healthy, and green, while calling meat consumption barbaric.
Chinese “netizens” were having none of it, mocking Zhang and Tao for promoting an “unhealthy lifestyle."
“Some extreme environmentalists in the West have a problem with people eating meat in China, even claiming that every time a Chinese person eats a piece of meat, ‘a puff of smoke rises from the Amazon forest,’” the Global Times said.
The paper associated the vegetarian conspiracy to the crusade by a streaming video account that urged Chinese people to eat less seafood.
The account was exposed as some kind of Western conspiracy to meddle in China’s collective colon because the content creators former employees made “anti-China comments on Twitter.”
The Global Times then pushed back against plant-based diets and said it was more about rejecting the demands of Western climate activists.
© press
Fudan University cyberspace research director Shen Yi said of Zhang and Tao:
“They were just deluded by some heresy."
"Some Western countries do not want to give up their luxurious lifestyles, driving cars with large engines and eating beef, but they ask developing countries to change to let them maintain their lifestyles."
The Global Times then argued that Chinese people eat less than half as much meat as Americans, implying vegetarians should look a the west.
As Breitbart reported:
This Communist Party backlash against Zhang and Tao’s video did not come out of nowhere.
The U.K. Guardian in March detected the “green shoots of a vegan meat revolution” sprouting in China, driven in part by lingering apprehension from the coronavirus crisis and China’s chronic epidemics of swine flu.
The Guardian noted the Chinese government made a climate-change commitment to reduce meat consumption in 2016, so the Party might be irritated by insinuations it has not done enough.
Also, meat consumption is considered a sign of prosperity in Chinese culture, so the prestige-conscious regime in Beijing feels insulted by demands for its population to embrace vegetarianism.
