Animal Protection
Animal protection in Japan and China
In the global context of environmental protection, transnational biodiversity activities, and habitat and wildlife protection networks, the protection of animals has emerged as a prominent field of civil society activity in Japan and China since the 1990s (Li 2006, Littlefair 2006). Going far beyond former isolated debates on national symbols such as the giant panda in China (Nicholls 2010) or whaling in Japan (Morikawa 2009), a wider public debate entailing concepts such as animal welfare, animal rights, and animal treatment in general, has emerged in recent years (Aoki 2009).
Advocates of a “Western” discourse of rights and modernity are contending with proponents of re-invented religious and cultural traditions, such as the Buddhist idea of rebirth and an aversion against the meat diet (Krämer 2008), Confucian ideas of caring for animals, Daoist doctrines of cosmological harmony etc. (Sausmikat 2012).
The Japanese government, and, even more so, the Chinese party-state, are facing a trade-off between external acknowledgement by international environmental and wildlife organizations (such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Greenpeace and the UK charity ACTAsia for Animals, which have launched intensive public awareness campaigns and pressed for the legal protection of animals in China since 2008; Cox et al. 2010), on the one hand, and domestic control of NGOs, on the other. China, in particular, seems to be pursuing a strategic combination of empowerment and protectification, the outcome of which is still to be determined.
In both countries, legislative debates have reflected ongoing negotiations between state and social, and international and domestic actors. In Japan, where cruelty against animals was first made an offence in the French-inspired penal code of 1880, even today’s Act on Welfare and Management of Animals (first enacted in 1973 and since then repeatedly revised), is clearly influenced by international considerations (Aoki 2007). The same is true for the hotly debated draft for a Chinese Animal Protection Law first presented by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences director Chang Jiwen in 2009 and submitted to the National People’s Congress in 2011 (Whitford 2012). The studies will trace the indigenous traditions of animal protection and analyze how they interact with global activities for bringing about new departures in animal protection in Japan and China.
