From “American Snack” to “Beijing specialty”：A Transpacific Story of Fried Chicken

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Abstract

In November 1987, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first location in mainland China at the heart of Beijing City. It was a big KFC location with a costly menu. A 2-piece chicken combo cost more than a tenth of the average monthly salary in Beijing. Despite the expensive menu, the restaurant became a huge success, in the following decades KFC opened more than 9000 locations in the country.
The success of KFC is not just the start of the dramatic expansion of a fast-food chain but also marks the beginning of the mass consumption of chicken in China. Starting from scratch, corporates like KFC built a new consumer experience of food for the Chinese, and a mass chicken breeding industry that significantly lowered the price of poultry in a short time. The Southern American chicken recipe circulated around Beijing, hundreds of smaller chicken restaurants and delivery places like “Yongshun fried chicken” rose, rebranding their chickens into “traditional Beijing specialty”. In its course, the foodways in China were greatly transformed, as well as people’s relationship with the chickens they breed and consume. The traditional backyard and free-range chicken breeding gave way to huge, centralized chicken farms, often with environmental consequences on local and national levels. An enormous system of extraction was built on chemical fertilizer, antibiotics chicken feed, and hundreds of gigantic farms reshaping local landscapes.
By examining this unique transpacific connection between the food culture of the American South and Beijing embedded in, deep fried, crispy poultry, this paper aims to combine food history, animal history, and history of capitalism to reveal how an “American snack” became a national favorite in China, and how the experience of Chinese consumers, producers, the mass of chickens they breed, and the land these chickens grew on were shaped and reshaped in this process.

Author

• Wenzheng Fang, University of Notre Dame