Abstract
“To understand China’s veterinarians, you need to know political economy,” Cai Haifeng, the senior national veterinarian at the fao Emergency Center, told me. We talked over lunch at an upscale Yunnan-style restaurant filled with white-collar professionals and expats near the Emergency Center offices. Before joining the FAO, Cai had spent de cades working as a livestock veterinarian battling epizootics, primarily with the Animal Quarantine Service (recently renamed the China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center). He was among the first generation to study veterinary science in the post-Mao period. Although his current mode of life found him more often in urbane