ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Modelling Life: How AI Reconfigures Disease, Labour, and Multispecies Relations in China’s Pig Corporates

• In Event: Attuning to Multispecies Worlds: Farmed Animals, One Health, and Shifting Scientific Practices in Modern China

English Abstract

This paper examines how China’s rapidly digitalising livestock sector is reshaping disease control at a moment when industrial animal production faces growing biosecurity risks. For decades, the industry relied on preventative antibiotics, yet outbreaks such as Avian Influenza and African Swine Fever continue to destabilise production. In response, corporates are adopting AI-based monitoring systems (i.e. biosensors) and smart biosecurity infrastructures (i.e. smart showering system) that imagine pathogens as moving linearly across humans, animals and materials by restricting movement, fortifying farm boundaries and deploying digital fences. Drawing on multispecies ethnography in a corporate pig farm deploying these technologies, the paper asks: what limitations arise when AI systems model disease spread through fixed- and topographical-based logics? This paper shows that these tools emphasise containment and linear separation, yet obscure the relational, and topological conditions through which disease emergences via densities, thresholds, and everyday multispecies interactions. By tracing these dynamics, the paper reveals how digital disease-control tools re-organise labour, redistribute responsibilities, and transform human–animal relations in China’s industrial farms.

Author

• Kin Wing Chan, Royal Agricultural University