By Klaus Grunert

China is the largest producer of pork in the world, and it is also the biggest market. No wonder then that European producers of pork have looked at China and posed themselves questions: Is this a major future export market for European pork products? Will the Chinese producers be a threat on our markets in the future? And which room is there for cooperation?

In finding answers to these questions, gaining a better understanding of the Chinese consumer is crucial. Q-PorkChains is therefore in the process of conducting a major study of the way the Chinese consume pork, their perception of a range of pork products, and their attitudes towards pork production. The study follows as much as possible the design of a similar study underway in EU countries.

However, this was not a question of just translating a questionnaire into Chinese and recruiting respondents. Moving a research design from one country to another, with different culture and language, always involves difficult questions of cross-cultural validity and comparability. In this case these problems were especially pron

ounced, since China is so different from Europe in many ways – in terms of language and culture, and more specifically in the way people shop, prepare meals, and eat. How do we study attitudes to pig production in a country where half of the pigs raised are in small farms with less than 10 pigs, while there on the other hand are industrial farms with 20,000 pigs? Does it give meaning to ask about animal welfare in China? How can we take care of the fact that a large percentage of shopping occurs in local markets and not in supermarkets? And which part of this vast country should we concentrate on in our study?

In taking care of these differences, the original questionnaire used in the European part of the study underwent considerable modifications – in close cooperation between the Q-Pork-Chains team from Aarhus University and the local team from Sun Yang-Tsen University in Guangzhou.

Published research on Chinese consumers is still scarce. Q-PorkChains will therefore break new grounds in giving a scientific snapshot of a country where not only industrial production, but also consumer habits are rapidly evolving.