In classical Chinese law, cruelty disrupted cosmic order and sentience carried moral weight. Under Xi Jinping, legality has been restructured to preempt such claims entirely. This third essay in the Simulated Sagehood series traces how animals and moral reasoning more broadly have been rendered legally irrelevant unless they serve statist aims.
What emerges is a new architecture of invisibility: a legal system that governs life without acknowledging it.
The exclusion of animals from legal protection in Xi Jinping’s China isn’t a bureaucratic oversight. It’s the product of a deliberate legal architecture – one where moral status isn’t denied or debated, but rendered irrelevant unless it serves state goals. Where thinkers like Mencius once imagined ren (仁) or humaneness as an ethic extending even to animals, tying moral virtue to cosmic order, Xi-era legality has stripped that ethic of force. Ren survives as a ceremonial echo, but it’s cut off from legal consequence.
At the heart of this transformation is the Chinese Communist Party’s central legal doctrine: yi fa zhi guo (依法治国), usually translated as “governing according to law.” To many outside China, it suggests a shift toward rule of law. In practice, it follows a very different tradition – one closer to Soviet-style legality, where law doesn’t constrain state power but enables it. Within this model, sentience isn’t a source of rights or obligations. What matters is not whether a being can suffer, but whether it’s useful to economic targets, rural development, or ideological stability.
This marks a sharp break from China’s older legal traditions. The Tang Code of 653 CE prohibited the unauthorized slaughter of work animals like oxen and horses, prescribing five years of penal servitude – especially when profit was the motive. These weren’t just ritual prescriptions; they reflected an ethic where agriculture, social order, and morality were interwoven. Tang emperors like Taizong issued bans on killing during Buddhist vegetarian fasts, linking political legitimacy to a cosmological balance that merged Confucian ren with Buddhist compassion.
Later, Qing dynasty codes penalized wanton cruelty to livestock – not from a belief in animal rights, but because such acts disrupted tian-ren heyi, the harmony between Heaven and humanity. A 1795 commentary on the Qing Code even noted that cruelty reflected a failure of local magistrates to instill ethical discipline – making enforcement not just legal, but moral. Even in authoritarian form, imperial law carried traces of ethical cosmology. That tradition has now been formally severed.
Xi’s legal framework codifies this severance. The 2020 Civil Code treats animals as dongchan (动产), or movable property – no different, legally, from furniture or machinery. Article 116 goes further, closing the door on new legal categories unless explicitly authorized by top-level law, locking out future recognition of sentience. The roots of this logic go back to the 1986 General Principles of Civil Law, which grouped “livestock, machinery, and raw materials” in a single property class – the first post-reform move to eliminate moral distinctions between living and non-living entities.
There was a chance to change course. During the 2020 drafting process, scholars pointed to Section 90a of the German Civil Code, which declares that “animals are not things,” while still applying property law. Some Chinese jurists proposed a new category – “special property” – for animals with “the capacity to feel.” But ministries pushed back. The Ministry of Agriculture warned it would “complicate livestock supervision.” The Ministry of Public Security flagged risks of “activist-driven litigation.” And the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress dismissed the idea outright, calling it “bourgeois humanitarianism.”
This phrasing echoed Soviet precedent: the 1931 Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, heavily shaped by Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s chief legal theorist, who had deliberately purged all references to “sentiment,” “dignity,” and “moral conscience,” explicitly branding them as petty-bourgeois distractions incompatible with class legality. Modern Chinese doctrine reflects this inheritance. Under Xi, moral reasoning is not simply excluded; it is discredited as epistemologically illegitimate.
The pattern is consistent. In 2009, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences scholar Chang Jiwen drafted a comprehensive anti-animal cruelty bill with 98 articles, proposing criminal penalties for abuse and public-interest standing for enforcement. It made it into the 2010 State Council legislative plan and opened for public comment online. But it was never submitted for debate. By 2014, the proposal had vanished from official servers, and Chang’s public talks were quietly halted. This wasn’t legislative delay. It was deletion through silence – a form of procedural erasure the CCP uses to shut down proposals without formal rejection, maintaining full discretion while avoiding backlash.
Meanwhile, industries built on systemic cruelty not only remain legal; they’re publicly endorsed. The 2016 revision of the Wildlife Protection Law retained Article 25’s provision for the “commercial breeding and rational use” of protected species. This includes bear bile farms, which are legal if they meet state quotas and licensing. The 2016 enforcement rules even required farms to keep at least 50 bears and install surveillance systems to monitor “free-drip” bile extraction. In other words, cruelty isn’t discouraged, it’s regulated. In some provinces, breeding manuals define bile extraction as a “specialty industry” under rural development policy. And it’s not just tolerated, it’s celebrated. The Ministry of Culture’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Network lists the Jinniu Eye-Medicine Preparation Technique, which uses bear bile, as a protected national tradition. Institutionalized cruelty becomes rural revitalization. Suffering becomes cultural heritage.
The same logic governs the digital space. On platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, animal suffering regularly trends. Videos of animals forced into distress or pain often go viral, and legal consequences are rare. When enforcement happens, it’s driven by public backlash, not legal norms. Even in egregious cases – like the 2021 “smoking monkey” video from a Hebei wildlife park – no criminal charges were filed. Under the current law, animal cruelty isn’t a punishable act, even its visibility is occasionally suppressed.
None of this is accidental. It flows from a legal worldview shaped by the convergence of two doctrines: Legalism and Leninism. Han Feizi’s classical system prioritized fa (law), shu (technique), and xing (punishment), explicitly rejecting virtue as unreliable. Law was to be precise, automatic, and detached from moral appeal. Vyshinsky had made the same point in modern terms: law exists to codify the will of the ruling class – not to express moral norms. Xi’s “yi fa zhi guo” fuses both traditions. Law is not a space for ethical deliberation. It is a tool of governance. Ren still appears on posters and in speeches. But in the courtroom, it has no standing.
The result is a legal system designed not to recognize dignity, but to administer control. Suffering, unless it threatens state objectives, is invisible to the law. Sentient life is governed but not acknowledged. Confucian ethics – once tethered to a vision of moral resonance across species and cosmos – are not refuted. They’re emptied out. Today, legal status comes not from being able to feel, but from being politically or economically useful. Everything else is outside the frame.